Indiana State Laptop Program
Benefits
The Indiana State Laptop Initiative will make our students more:
- Marketable: Coming from a laptop university, an Indiana State degree adds value to graduates in the competitive job market as it demonstrates a well-rounded, technologically savvy student who has already mastered the computer skills employers expect of new hires.
- Productive: Laptops will allow students to become more efficient in their homework preparation, access to electronic resources, and other research endeavors. This will increase student productivity and lead to more active learning and better retention of course materials.
- Interactive: Pervasive campus computing can increase faculty-student, student-student, and faculty-faculty communication, participation, and feedback which contributes to a greater sense of community and a more robust, active learning environment.
- Supported: Technical support for hardware and software issues, including loaner systems, is available on-campus for program-purchased systems. With the entire campus more technologically savvy, students have more places to turn to for support.
- Empowered: Mobile computing is available anytime, anywhere. The convenience and efficiency with which students can conduct academic, administrative, and personal activities is empowering.
Universities which have adopted individual, mobile computing speak to multiple benefits culminating in higher retention rates and higher cumulative GPA for students.
Some other benefits are:
- Increased self-exploration—student identification of strengths and weaknesses, tracking progress, learning a variety of presentation styles, reflecting on learning and applying learning to their experience.
- Active engagement in discovering knowledge and applying skills.
- Significant improvement in information technology knowledge, skills, and confidence.
- Increased time spent on higher level modeling and analysis rather than tedious low-level functions.
- Integration of lecture and lab activities previously delegated to specific physical space, so that learning activities are dictated by the educational objectives rather than physical location.
- Use of current, software and web-based information rather than outdated textbooks.
- More efficient use of class time through use of electronic documents and anytime, anywhere resources and information.
Feedback from current notebook universities suggests that ISU can expect the introduction of notebook computers to support and enhance community engagement and experiential learning for our students.