How Borders Colleges Chose LapSafe® Smart Lockers

LapSafe® met with Borders College’s Head of ISLT, Scott Moncrieff, to discuss his process of finding the best Smart Locker for the college.

Customer Profile

Borders College, located in the Scottish Borders, offers a wide range of courses. As a result of a multi-million-pound project, the campus provides a unique learning and teaching environment, featuring practical training areas, a well-stocked library and learning resource centre, and enhanced IT facilities.

Goal

Borders College wanted to move towards publishing more of its curriculum content online and offer remote courses, so students didn’t need to visit the college as often (this was well before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic). As a result, Scott Moncrieff and his team were tasked with improving the IT facilities.

The college already provided laptops to bursary-funded students to assist them with their learning, this helped to bridge the digital divide for students who don't have access to laptops.

We have a few traditional laptop lockers in some classrooms, but these are not available to everybody. This is why we thought we would look at self-service laptop loaning lockers.

Research

In 2019, Scott began his research by visiting the BETT Show in London, he spent the day visiting the stands, talking to vendors, and watching demonstrations, one of which was LapSafe®.

We did that with two or three different self-service laptop loan companies. Once we had seen them all, the LapSafe® lockers came head and shoulders above the rest in terms of how easy it was to use. It looked really intuitive and would be easy for our students to use.

We were also amazed and pleased to see how aesthetically pleasing they looked; they looked so much nicer than all the rest, and we were really sold at this point. I think it’s tough to make a big tin box look attractive, but this looked really nicely designed compared to the others. We were able to customise it with our branding and choose our own college colours which was a huge attraction. The price point was slightly higher than most, but we felt it was worthwhile because of the look, quality, and ease of use for our students.

Following Scott’s visit to the Bett Show, he continued his research and was able to visit Heriot Watt University, which had already installed the LapSafe® Diplomat™ Pro Smart Lockers. By doing this, Scott was able to see them in use and discuss how easily they worked and if there were any problems.

Whilst at Heriot Watt University, Scott was also able to view the admin dashboard of the Diplomat™ Pro Smart Locker, which provides comprehensive reports and usability tracking.

Investment

Borders College was satisfied with its research and made its final decision to invest in a Diplomat™ Pro Smart Locker.

From then the LapSafe® installation team liaised with Borders College before the installation to talk through the installation process.

Receiving all the necessary information before the actual installation allowed our facilities team to make sure the area we had chosen to place the units was suitable and the correct size. Having the details about where the power went into the lockers helped us to ensure our sockets were installed in the correct location. The first unit was installed in our main campus and was situated in the main reception area, any student could come up and borrow a laptop at any time of the day. They can then use it throughout the day but must return it to the unit by the time the campus closes at 8.45 pm. So as long as it is brought back by then, they wouldn’t receive a library return notice.

Overall, the experience was excellent, and our account manager, Ben was fantastic from start to finish. He kept us up-to-date with regard to where in the process the order was. When it came to doing the branding, he was accommodating in working with our marketing team to ensure that the colours were correct. Even now Ben keeps in touch with us to keep us aware of any new innovations and software upgrades. The college is really interested in the ‘NEW UV-C sanitising station that is being launched by LapSafe® soon’.

Satisfaction

We feel our move to self-service has been a success and it has helped us achieve our objective of providing devices to as many students as possible to allow them to access learning material and all students have access to a fully charged device when required. My counterpart at Dumfries and Galloway College got in touch recently to say they were looking at introducing the system. I asked if they wanted to come over and see ours in action, which they did.

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