Page 10 - College Planning & Management, January/February 2019

Technology INNOVATIONS FOR EDUCATION
Top Uses for Digital Signage and Displays
Details of developing a successful installation on the campus of West Virginia University.
BY STEPHEN STAVAR
IAM PART OF A TWO-PERSON team whose sole job is to build and maintain the InfoStations, a central-
ized digital signage network of 175+ dis- plays across 50 properties at West Virginia University (WVU). Those displays consist of commercial-grade monitors mounted in various configurations, some with touch capabilities. The team works to make the InfoStations the second-most used digital displays for students, faculty, staff, and visitors on campus. The first? The phone in their pocket.
The Impetus
In 2007, we realized the need for a cen- tralized way to communicate with students, faculty, and staff in the event there was an incident that required campus-wide com- munications. The initial task was to install “ten TV screens with the ability to show emergency messaging.” At many institu-
tions, this scope of work would fall to Infor- mation Technology services or classroom tech department. At WVU, the central video production team took on the task.
I see four main components to digital signage. You cannot have one without know- ing and understanding the others, though my order of importance is backwards from what many would consider the most impor- tant parts of a digital signage solution.
1. Content. Since the initial charge of the InfoStations was to provide the ability to generate emergency alerts, the team saw no other way than to make the InfoSta- tions the central hub of all digital visual communications throughout campus. The real strength and greatest benefit of the InfoStations is that they provide the ability to centralize all messaging.
Every monitor has the ability to display emergency alerts from the University Police
PHOTOS COURTESY OF WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY
Department (UPD) through an RSS feed within seconds of an alert being pushed. The monitors switch over to the emergency mes- saging, often sooner than an accompanying text message. With ongoing messaging sent through the UPD’s Twitter account, the InfoStations flip between the alert and the Twitter messaging throughout the duration of an event. The emergency alert is the only message with audio that automatically plays on our system. The display plays an alert tone followed by a computerized reading of the message.
What seemed like an odd choice in as- signing the video production team to head up the design and installation of the uni- versity’s digital signage network actually became another asset in the success of the InfoStations. Not only does the team have a working knowledge of visual communica- tion hardware and software, but also more importantly, the understanding of the need to provide 24-hour programming.
2. Get it on the screen. When we started the InfoStations we tried to put as much information on a single screen as possible. We had a lot of information—weather, radar, time, date, an RSS crawl, posters, text, calendar feed, etc. Even worse, many of the templates were laid out differently, so the time may have been in the upper left on one
10 COLLEGE PLANNING & MANAGEMENT / JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2019
WEBCPM.COM