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Amity is the leading group of private educational institutions in India with over 22000 students, 53 institutions spread over 12 campuses. Amity is proud to have the first and largest private university in India, the first wireless campus in India and the No. 1 ranked private B-School in India.
Currently the main campuses are based in New Delhi, Noida, and Gurgaon with new campuses coming up across the country. Amity has always been at the forefront of technology and education and was one of the first to launch programs like Cyber Law, Bio-informatics and Nanotechnology amongst many others. Amity has now over 1500 faculty members, which include six former Vice Chancellors and many renowned professionals from leading corporates and governments.
Situation
Last year, Amity had mobilized its students with the country’s first wireless campus through HP’s mobility solutions, which the institute prides itself on today. Amity’s administrators took this decision, as they firmly believed that IT would play a major role in furthering the multidisciplinary approach to education. One of the challenges, which Amity Business School wanted to address, was to incorporate computer technology into the classroom-learning environment.
In 2000, the school spelled out its vision of a 'cyber school' that would make use of wireless LAN technology to incorporate IT into the everyday learning experience of students enrolled at Amity Business School. Part of the plan was to provide students with free laptops, which were WiFi, enabled and would run educational software as directed by the school administrators.
'The cost of the technology and keeping it up-to-date wouldn’t be low, but we were confident that the returns, in educational terms, would be extremely high,' says Mr. Chauhan.
As a part of the mobility drive last year, the school went ahead and made the campus WiFi enabled and provided its student s with laptops to facilitate their curriculum. While having a laptop enhanced the computer skills of students, the scheduled use of WiFi campus further heightened the ability to access technology without being connected with wires.
Challenges
This year, Amity planned to extend the same program to its students of 8 courses at their campus. The key concern of Amity this year was the increasing complexity of managing 2000+ laptops and on the maintenance support provided to students for their laptops. Amity was also in a phase of expansion and was also looking at financial schemes to help them to free their cash flows.
'With HP’s proven track record at our institute that mirrors its performance in the market, we decided to extend our relationship with them to enable our students to perform better and build their careers at our campus,' says Mr. Chauhan.
A campus on the move
Amity placed an order for 800 laptops for their General MBA and International MBA program students. Each student received an HP laptop to use for the entire academic year. The teaching staff was also provided with HP Notebooks as teaching tools.
To cater to the customers requirements this year, the campus was provided with the nx6120 laptop that offered all the advanced features of HP’s new generation notebooks on the Celeron M platform.
A Service Helpdesk for the students on the campus was also setup through HP Services. The support service offered a Service Helpdesk with 2 engineers at site and 1 coordinator, a call tracking process to keep the students updated on the status of their notebooks, a pickup and drop facility for the notebooks from Amity to HP service center and regular status reports and closure details to Amity management.
HP’s Financial Services was also involved in the process and was able to provide Amity with a loan at an attractive rate complete the offering and help Amity in providing the laptops to its students at the earliest.
With ROI being the buzzword, ABS anticipates that the costs incurred will be recovered in the form of increased student & teacher efficiency and effective infrastructure management.
'Through its cooperation with HP, Amity Business School has evolved from a school housing traditional standalone computer laboratories to a 100 percent mobile campus. The success of this project is the result of a team approach taken by the school's administrators and our technology partners, to turn what was originally simply a wishful idea into reality,' Mr. Chauhan says.
'Our vision is to have technology with us always, and have the world available at our fingertips whenever and wherever required,' says Mr. Chauhan, Founder President, Amity Business School
Results
With a robust IT infrastructure in place that Amity prides itself on, the students are now able to focus on enhancing their capabilities and performance. With a networked computer laboratory connected to Internet for use by students and a robust support system in place the students and the management at Amity are able to perform in a hassle free environment.
Mr. Chauhan says the most obvious result of the introduction of mobility in a given class was the increase in the level of attentiveness among students. 'With their PCs in hand, students can now quickly access appropriate websites or software when required in a given class. With the impressive performance of the HP products, the universe suddenly comes alive in a business session,' says Mr. Chauhan.
'HP Mobility Solutions also enables our teaching staff to effectively and efficiently create lesson plans, design tests and keep track of students' performance using Notebooks,' Mr. Chauhan adds.
In addition, specially designed Amity Logo stickers were pasted on the notebooks and on the notebook bags to lend exclusivity to the Amity fraternity.
The road forward
Amity Business School has been thrilled with the response. With this initiative the management at Amity is focusing on developing institute as one of the best in the world emphasizing on the core values essentially a competent faculty, an optimum infrastructure and a wire free world for the students who are determined to excel.
With Amity placing an order for 800 laptops for their General MBA and International MBA program students this year, the institute is expected to place additional orders for students across 6 other courses over the next 3 months which is expected to be another 1500 laptops.
As a continual exercise to build on the great relationship HP shares with Amity Business School, the teams are currently engaged in developing a complete e-learning solution through HP Education including a Learning Management System (LMS) & Virtual Classroom Tutor (VCT). |
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