Students to get ‘Starbucks’ experience

Hopwood Hall College has teamed up with Pennine Telecom to help it achieve its aim to provide students with around-the-clock access to its resources.

The telecommunications specialist has installed some 136 wireless access points across the College’s Middleton and Rochdale campuses. The service is free for students and will enable them to use their own laptops, netbooks and smartphones, wherever they may be on the College premises; many colleges have Wi-Fi ‘hotspots’, but few have such extensive coverage; it doesn’t matter if the student is at the College’s new 3G Sports Park in Middleton or in the basement at Rochdale, they will get wireless access.

“It’s our vision to provide students with 24/7 access to college resources 365 days of the year” explains Hopwood Hall’s Director of Technology and Innovation, Simon Evans. “We wanted to create what I call the ‘Starbucks’ experience for students so that they could grab a cup of coffee in our Bistro, catch up on emails, do some studying or research.”

This service is a brilliant way of supporting and promoting students’ learning. “There’s so much online content relating to the various curriculums; if students have got a couple of hours between lessons they can access it through their own device, or they can go to a Learning Resource centre and borrow a netbook. Not every student will have a PC at home, so we want to help these students as much as we can. These days, a student is much more likely to go and search the internet for a project than they are to go to a library for a book.”

The free Wi-Fi service is also free to all members of the community who visit the College to use its facilities; members of the public can surf the net completely free of charge whilst they enjoy a tasty meal in the College’s training restaurant The Cottons, have their hair cut stylishly in the training salon The Image, use the College’s fantastic Sports Arena or have business meetings in the College’s conferencing suites.