You may have heard that Lyon College in Batesville is keeping its students at home this fall, but you may not know that the private institution is piloting remote-learning software, hardware and services provided by Apogee of Austin, Texas.
The pilot project is a few months in the making, but the college’s relationship with the company dates back to 2017, according to Andrew English, Lyon’s director of institutional research.
That’s when Apogee — which services more than 400 higher education institutions, a roster that includes Johns Hopkins University and Arizona State University — stepped in to make Lyon’s Wi-Fi network faster and more reliable.
“Wi-Fi used to be one of the top three student complaints that we had, and after bringing on that network, the student complaints have just evaporated,” English said.
The next year, Lyon’s leadership began discussing a strategic partnership with Apogee officials. The company was officially brought on board in July 2019 to help manage the college’s information technology services.
English said three Apogee employees came to work on campus and one full-time employee at the company’s Austin headquarters is dedicated to servicing Lyon. The college has access to other remote Apogee employees as well.
The company also manages student workers in the college’s IT department; they’re considered Lyon employees and Apogee interns.
Thanks to the pilot project, the college now has the capacity to “remotely teach courses that are comparable to our in-person courses,” English said. “It’s also allowed us to rebuild 95% of our server core.” An upgraded server core means faster internet service, plus the backup capability and security needed for remote learning.
“My thinking about technology, both infrastructure and supportive technology, on campus is it’s kind of like dining. Colleges and universities, unless they’re on a very large scale, are not going to be very good at it on their own. It’s the reason why you outsource food service. It’s the same reason I pretty much insisted that we outsource not only the rebuilding of our infrastructure but then the operations on an ongoing basis,” said Lyon President W. Joseph King.
For example, the college could never afford to hire its own cybersecurity expert, and it would be difficult to attract that kind of talent to Batesville, he said. Apogee has a cybersecurity expert Lyon can consult should the need arise.
“So you benefit from them having this really deep expertise and this big operational team in Austin. When we need cybersecurity, they can bring the best, world-class solution to it,” King said.
He declined to disclose terms of the college’s new contract with the company, but said having such a contract achieves a few goals: It gives Lyon’s leadership advanced knowledge of what its IT expenses are going to be and what the school will get for its money, and it guarantees quality service as well as state-of-the-art technology for years to come.
The company benefits from the pilot project because Lyon can test and provide feedback on products and services before Apogee rolls them out to its customers nationwide, King said, adding that the college is “happy to be the test case.”
While the pandemic was a catalyst for the pilot project, King said the college’s partnership with the company is important in any event because students expect to have the options it provides.
In addition, he said, the technologies that Lyon and Apogee are giving students access to are the same technologies that they’ll need to be familiar with when they start their careers or further their education elsewhere.
English agreed. “As a liberal arts institution, we try to pride ourselves on developing well-rounded students with a holistic education. And part of that, nowadays, is the technology. You can’t be well-rounded if you’re missing a major piece of that,” he said. “Students have to emerge from college technically literate. They have to have these skills to be able to carry out the rest of their lives, effectively and meaningfully, but it also supports all the other disciplines.”
“There’s an emerging field, like digital humanities, that takes existing disciplines that have been around for millennia and it combines them with technology in new ways. And so this allows us to advance the body of knowledge to create stronger graduates than we would have otherwise been able to without having a strong technical foundation in addition to the other aspects of a traditional liberal arts education.”
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