• silicon.com
• Management
• Public Sector

By Tim Ferguson, 2 July 2008 10:30

Oaklands College near St Albans is planning to offer its students the best in high-tech learning when its £100m new campus opens in 2011.

The new building will bring together four existing campuses and the use of technology has been very much at the forefront of the project.

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The project was prompted by a poor Ofsted report in 2003, which saw the college set the goal of achieving an 'excellent' rating by 2011.

Richard Everett, director of e-learning for Oaklands, told silicon.com: "We're on a journey from a less than satisfactory inspection in 2003 to being outstanding in 2011."

The college currently has 3,200 full-time students between the ages of 16 and 19 and a further 8,000 adult further-education students.

Mark Dawe, principal of the college, said the project represents a one-off opportunity to create a modern learning environment with a completely clean sheet.

Oaklands has worked with IT services company, Computacenter, to form the technology strategy and plan its new IT network.

The college network will serve as a platform for e-learning and audio visual tools as well as a high-tech building management system to create an "intelligent building".

The building will be fully wireless-enabled so students and staff can access the network wherever they are. There will be 2,400 data points and 900 wireless access points in the building.

"The idea behind that is to create flexibility. The intelligence of the building is key to this [project]," Everett said.

But unusually the campus won't have a computer room as the aim is to give every student to have access to a laptop that can use the college network.

Around £2.7m of the college's £9m IT budget has been earmarked for audiovisual technology with interactive electronic whiteboard planned for all 150 classrooms.

Everett said: "I think the biggest challenge as a college has been for people to buy into our vision of an intelligent building."

There will also be cameras to record lessons, which then go onto the Virtual Learning Environment. There are also plans to use electronic swipe cards across the campus to access the building but also to automate collection of attendance records.

The college also has green aspirations and has received an energy grant from the Learning and Skills Council to replace its CRT screens with more efficient LCD monitors.

The building will even have solar panels which will be used to heat water in the campus.