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Events on campus yield big data with new mobile app


College events have for decades been advertised through bulletin boards in residence halls and at intersections of sidewalks that wind through campus.

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Campuses have found myriad ways to leverage Big Data.

A new mobile app is being piloted at several campuses with a goal of replacing those bulletin boards, and providing administrators with something cork and paper never could: data.

Appropriately named after another common campus advertising spot, Campus Quad lets students, faculty, and administrators create and share flyers, post classifieds, and communicate with one another.

“The whole idea is that it is one space for all the things that a student cares about,” said Frances Cairns, founder and CEO of Campus Quad. “It’s one place to see everything and explore everything that’ happening on campus.”

Helping students explore in a more traditional sense will be the platform’s mapping feature. When a photo or flyer is posted on Campus Quad, the event’s location is displayed on a map in real time.

Campus leaders may appreciate the feature even more than students, said Farouk Dey, the associate vice provost and executive director of Career Development Services at Stanford University.

“The mapping gives you a better perspective of the events happening on campus,” Dey said. “You start getting a sense what areas are more successful than others, and where outreach needs to be targeted.”

See Page 2 for details on how Stanford is using Campus Quad, and the data it provides, to beef up their career service department.

So far, Stanford is primarily using the platform for events related to career services and to create “career communities” at the university.

As Campus Quad bills itself as a platform that fosters “digital communities,” Dey said the app seemed like a perfect fit.

Career counselors are creating events and meetups to get like-minded students networking and connecting with one another. Students and campus leaders use the platform’s photo application to document and share parts of events across social media.

All the while, Dey is able to keep track of how successful, or unsuccessful, these events are by monitoring the data pouring into a specialized dashboard on his computer and phone.

“The data has been tremendous,” he said. “We’re able to look at engagement, all sorts of analytics. We can see what’s happening in photos and through comments that show the popularity of certain meetups.”

The university is still in the early stages of piloting the platform, but Dey said that, over time, he envisions the majority of students on campus utilizing the app, increasing the amount of data and insights campus leaders could learn.

Eventually, Campus Quad would also be utilized by other communities on campus, such as the Greek, athletic, and residential populations.

“Administrators push out announcements and events through social media, flyers, and other forms of communication, but they’ve not been able to cull data from that,” Cairns said. “This puts that data in your hands, and lets you evaluate how effective your stuff is across these digital communities.”

Follow Jake New on Twitter at @eCN_Jake, and join the conversation with #eCNMobile.

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