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Everything that we do is basically student focused and staff focused. The major
shift over the past few years with the increased fees in the U.K.--so, now we've gone from
paying three thousand pounds a year to University of York pays nine thousand pounds a year per
student. Here's this buzzword of the student experience. And that's the buzzword that
basically is--every project, if you can say it's funding the student experience, then
CD management team will like that. And they can see that this focus from previous years
from the staff and kind of what they need has shifted toward the student experience
now. So, bring your own device policy--students have been bringing their own device in for
years. That's all they have within their classrooms.
If I had to do anything differently, I would say get a policy first. What we did was--
or possibly what I was guilty of was in my own head having an idea of what our bring
your own device policy will be, what we'll support, what we won't support, where that
support ends because you can start giving support to something, and it's very difficult
to get out of it if it's not your area of responsibility. So, for instance, we'll
help with access to university systems, but if somebody's asking about privacy settings
on Facebook, if you start going down that line, they expect that every time they ring.
So, we would--I would, personally, recommend get in a bring your own device policy from
the start. And you can set expectations from the moment you start giving that support.
That's something that I would recommend to everybody. The main thing is just don't
ignore it. It's not going to go away. You can't just say we're not going to support
bring your own device. You need to really think about what your business needs, what
you can support. Make sure people are trained and prepared.
It's hard. Change is always hard. You'll always have people who go with it, people
who go off the scale and just walk out the door, who can't cope with the level of
change. Look at Windows 8. It's completely different from anything we'd see before.
You need to keep up with it. You need to train people and buy devices. There's no way
your support staff can learn to support something if they've never used it themselves. So,
little investing on buying stuff within the department for people to use goes a long way.