Doncaster Education City is a £90m theme park-style building located on the town’s Waterfront – it is also a distinctly different type of educational establishment, boasting leading-edge network and infrastructure technology.
The campus will house a new university, as well as a traditional college of further education.
Graeme Tizard, director of IT at Doncaster Education City (DEC), says the new centre aims to promote lifelong learning through an innovative and accessible learning environment.
‘One of the core principles underpinning the design of the college has been to create a compact and efficient building constructed from sustainable materials with minimum reliance on fossil fuels,’ he says.
Tizard says passive systems, such as stack ventilation, maximisation of natural light, solar shading and cool ceilings, are fundamental elements of the design.
‘Another original aspect of the building design is that we use canal water and collected rainwater for cooling areas including the central computer room,’ he says.
One of the biggest benefits the organisation has experienced with the new building has been the opportunity to make step changes in the business.
‘We wanted to use the focus of the new building to drive as much change through the organisation as possible – not just in terms of the technology we employ, but also in how we actually do things,’ says Tizard.
The whole process of the new build has centred on an opportunity to move the business forward as well as to reposition it, increasing efficiency and deploying the associated technology to underpin the changes. For Tizard and his team, determining an appropriate IT strategy to support the business and its new vision has been crucial.
Gaining approval from all the interested parties was essential to the success of the project, so Tizard took the unusual step for an educational establishment of having the document professionally printed in full colour.
‘It is strange, but people are less likely to take issue and want to change the contents if it is presented to them in a glossy printed format,’ he says.
‘Having a hard, full-colour copy helped us to set the policy in stone more readily than if we had issued a Word document on the intranet.’
Taking the lead from the approved document, the technical group then developed the functional specifications that went out to formal tender.
Once the building project was under way, the technical elements had to be prioritised and phased. At that point, Tizard brought the business back into the decision-making process to ensure that the business requirements were still in line with the strategy.
‘My advice to anyone in a new build situation is to invest heavily in the lowest level of infrastructure – make sure that there are lots of cables and that they are fast,’ he says.
DEC invested more than £1.5m on 50 kilometres of the latest 10 Gbit/s copper infrastructure from network provider ADC Krone.
Tizard says that as well as supporting the usual data, voice and video, all the building management services and access controls also run over the network.
‘It has a tough job to do, and with 8,000 low-voltage network points scattered throughout the building, the savings are going to build in years to come when we need to move or add telephones, CCTV cameras, building sensors as well as computing equipment and network devices,’ he says.
The new campus has also given DEC an opportunity to appraise its existing business systems and undertake migrations and integration projects.
Because corridors, doors and lifts are all electronically controlled, and access depends on student and staff cards, it was essential that as soon as a student was enrolled, or a new member of staff employed, their identity card worked.
‘This entailed a seamless integration of our student management, HR, network service, telephone and email systems,’ says Tizard.
‘And that was no mean feat technologically. However, what we have achieved with DEC, the new building and the technology, is very close to the ideal vision for education that has been talked about for the last 10 years.
‘Our students and staff are interacting fully with the education process, which makes for greater staff efficiency and an amazing student experience.’
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