Towards Smart Campus Management: Defining Information Requirements for Decision Making through Dashboard Design

Abstract

At universities worldwide, the notion of a ‘smart campus’ is becoming increasingly appealing as a response to the multitude of challenges that impact campus development and operation. Smart campus tools are widely used to support students and employees, optimise space use and save energy. Although smart campus tools are supposed to support campus managers in their decision-making processes, the use of the information delivered by smart campus tools and their application in organisational processes has received little attention. In this paper, we focus on the use of dashboards in the connection of IoT information to strategic decision-making processes in the management of university campuses. To this end, we developed a briefing approach for dashboards that expresses the needs of campus management and matches the structure of decision-making processes. In two cases, dashboards based on this approach were use-tested by stakeholders for defining information requirements for IoT applications. The results suggest that users are able to use dashboards for assessing portfolio performance and determining interventions. Through iteration the usability of the dashboard is improved and information requirements are refined, resulting in a brief for a campus management dashboard. The results suggest that the briefing approach can be used to determine IoT information requirements, though further research is required to study indications and contra-indications of the proposed method.

The influence of using smart technologies for sustainable development in higher education institutions

“…Smart campus initiatives, enabled by digital transformation in higher education, aim to create technologically advanced and sustainable educational environments to meet the evolving needs of students, faculty, and staff (Polin et al, 2023). A Smart Campuses initiates with pervasive, trusted wired, wireless connectivity outdoors and indoors (Valks, et al, 2021;Caţă, 2015;Adomßent et al, 2019). Alwaer et al (2010) define Smart buildings as technologically aware, sustainable, healthy buildings that meet the needs of occupants and businesses, flexible and adaptable to deal with change.…”

Revising Technology Adoption Factors for IoT-Based Smart Campuses: A Systematic Review

“…The literature regarding smart explanations differs, but the focus is on how smart technologies leverage education services. A smart campus is viewed as an integration of computing technologies in the cloud and IoT devices that assist the university's management, teaching, and research activities [4,[9][10][11]80]. Nevertheless, work by [14] has categorized IoT-based solutions into two classifications that reflect smart education concepts, namely, smart universities and smart campuses.…”

“…As a result, the VAM model is the most accurate in predicting the values associated with higher education institutions as a result of the adoption of the smart campus idea. Hence, the adoption model intends to demonstrate the impact of smart campuses to help stakeholders and policymakers see the value derived from the adoption of smart campuses to improve effective resource utilization, energy savings, informed decision making, improved services, and risk mitigation [10,80,133,134]. Therefore, the conceptual model adopted the generic VAM constructs (usefulness, enjoyment, technicality, and cost), trust, and privacy and security as factors influencing the intention to adopt IoT-based smart campuses, as shown in Figure 11.…”

“…Hence, the concept of smart cities can be extended to improve sustainable education infrastructure [7] with examples such as smart classrooms, smart payments, smart stadiums, and smart parking [8]. Universities have seen an explosion of several electronic devices used by students and on campus that are connected to the university network, resulting in a huge amount of data that could be used for decision making [9][10][11]. The promise of smart cities via the usage of smart technologies and IoT devices has pushed universities towards adopting the smart city concept on various campuses [4].…”

Internet of Things and Its Applications to Smart Campus: A Systematic Literature Review

“…Zhou et al [12] stated that it has three characteristics: Comprehensive perception, reliable data transmission, and intelligent processing. IoT is the aggregation of connected devices, data analytics, and physical objects [13] and brought along desirable technological advances of Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), Mixed Reality (MR), and 3D immersive learning [14]. There is a greater opportunity for these tools to revolutionize the teaching and learning processes, as they would allow students to engage in immersive learning that is a hugely effective elevating learning experience.…”