Purdue News
Purdue News
Students come to Purdue expecting to find the best in computing facilities, and the University is trying to stay ahead of the demand curve.
In 1989, the University set out to create as many new undergraduate computing labs as money and space would allow. To provide computing for the greatest number of people, the labs are designed to be used as classrooms or as walk-in open labs. In the eight years since, space has been remodeled to create about 50 new labs with a total of 2,000 workstations. Costs have totaled nearly $12 million.
Although the pace has been impressive, John Steele, director of the Purdue University Computing Center, says the University is looking to do more.
"Money is one limiting factor, but by far the greatest limiting factor is space," Steele says. "It's been harder and harder to find space."
Because of the difficulty in finding rooms that aren't needed for classrooms, offices and laboratories, planners have been quick to claim space as it becomes available.
For instance, when the Liberal Arts and Education Building was finished in late 1992, vacated space on the fourth floor of the Engineering Administration Building was set aside for undergraduate computer labs.
Two labs -- a Macintosh lab and a PC lab -- opened in the fourth floor space in the fall. Used for classes by day and for walk-in computing evenings, the labs are constantly occupied.
"As soon as we finish these new labs, they fill up," Steele says.
This summer, construction will begin on a 25,000-square-foot addition on the north side of Stanley Coulter Hall. The three-story addition, due for completion in summer 1998, will include seven computer labs for use as classrooms and open labs. The project will add 200 undergraduate computing workstations.
Two other labs are planned for completion this fall:
Still, new labs can't keep up with student demand.
"Even with the number of stations we have and those we're adding, we still have thousands of students who want access to workstations," Steele says. "We have to find other ways to meet students' needs beyond on-campus facilities."
About half of the 10,000 students who live in the residence halls have computers, and they can access the Purdue computing network from their rooms. All halls also have open labs for residents' use.
Steele and others now are concentrating on students who live off-campus and how to provide low-cost access to the Purdue network. Two initiatives are in the works:
"With both of these, we want students off campus to be able to do anything they can do in on-campus computing labs at home," Steele says. "All of these efforts are part of a larger vision and plan to move toward a more distributed computing environment.
"This will be an environment wherein students will be able to do much of their computing on their own computers in their residences and, eventually, in a wireless mode wherever they may be."
In addition to the 2,000 workstations provided for use by students in all schools installed in the past eight years, each of the schools addresses student computing needs. Examples range from partnerships with private industry to acquire the latest equipment to an entirely new computing environment based on portable "plug-and-play" computing.
Several schools have enjoyed great success in forming partnerships with corporations, including AT&T, IBM and Hewlett-Packard.
Using equipment provided by the companies and additional University funds, a number of technology-based curriculum improvements have been achieved.
An example is a strategic management course in the Krannert Graduate School of Management, which has used multimedia business cases that allow students to pace their own learning by drawing upon recorded lectures, guest speaker videos and data.
Another management class introduces students -- and faculty and staff -- to multimedia. Instructional materials are produced using multimedia technology and students develop presentations using multimedia tools to demonstrate their skills with the technology.
In the Schools of Engineering, faculty and staff are designing a new computing environment as a way to meet the future needs of students, faculty and staff.
According to Larry Huggins, associate dean of engineering, the environment would provide convenient and mobile network access from laboratories, classrooms, offices or residences for authorized users. Students and instructors would be able to enter a classroom or lab and, without direct intervention of technical staff, connect their personal machine configured with a standardized operating system and networking hardware.
No time table is set for completion of the new environment.
"We're moving ahead with this vision for the future with the notion in mind that computing is more than computing," Huggins says. "It really is tomorrow's communication media."
In addition, the Engineering Computer Network maintains more than 2,000 workstations for faculty, staff and students.
Purdue News Service: (765) 494-2096; e-mail, purduenews@purdue.edu
