The biggest shift facing every single University today is international student mobility. We have new international students arriving in every country and institution each year and each semester. The global population of students moving to another country to study continues to increase.

The OECD has projected that international student mobility is likely to reach 8 million students per year by 2025. The USA remains the most popular country for international students, followed by the UK, Germany, France and Australia. Half of all international students are pursuing degrees in these five countries.

Attracting students

Attracting students has never been more important – or more difficult. Leading institutions continue to strive for new ways to improve academic excellence and student experience. The quality of both campuses and facilities is a vital factor in young millennial students choosing their path. Universities are upgrading campus buildings, renovating grounds and improving their environments, including how students, teachers and visitors interact with them.

Today’s students live in a digital world and most universities take every opportunity to embrace technology. They build mobile apps and tools, but here’s the problem: these are often disconnected in function and form and are nearly impossible for universities to maintain and students to use in any kind of meaningful way.

The result? Inaccurate information, poor usability, low uptake and dissatisfaction amongst users.

Consistent campus user experience

At PAM, we’re solving these problems by providing a consistent user experience across all touch points. The user experience is delivered through a management interface that powers the entire environmental experience. PAM provides physical signage management, digital signage content delivery, interactive kiosk functionality and device-based experiences for wayfinding and campus information.

We’re constantly developing ways to improve the user experience and make administration of the wayfinding system simpler. Our 360 Connect campus kiosk platform delivers an always-accurate campus map in 3D.

A campus for all users

The functions that students love most include the multilingual interface and the text-to-voice capability. 360 Connect provides digital-handshake functionality, so students and visitors can take the wayfinding information they’ve found with them on their personal device as they make their way to their destination. This information can allow for accessibility, so everyone gets the same quality of information. Changes to staff locations or building names can be made through the Pam system and instantly reflected across all environmental experience touch points.

Campus maps use our newly-developed 360 eXplorer platform, which features an impressive range of capabilities including blue-dot location tracking of the user’s location within a 3D environmental view of the campus.

Improving the environmental experience on campus is a difficult task, and one that must improve results without becoming a burden on stretched FM teams and university campus administrators. Pam is working to give universities the tools they need, and to make sure students, staff and visitors get the most from every campus experience.