Importance of Kiosk Management Software for Educational Institutes

by Ryan W. Network Security Admin

The role of administrators in educational institutes is not limited to facilitating learning and development anymore. There are seemingly innumerable other tasks and responsibilities like organizing events, providing access to computers and the internet for sharing student information, setting up the assessment environment, resolving student issues and queries, managing transport, maintaining student records, etc. that school or college authorities have to fulfil on a regular basis.

In order to automate such activities, educational institutes are moving towards adopting self-service kiosks. The objective is to improve the in-campus experience and to minimize additional burden on the staff.

Advantages of installing Interactive Kiosks

Flexibility for Students: Kiosks allow students to access information, print documents, check class plan, raise complaints or requests, and do similar work without being totally dependent on admin office or the computer laboratory.

Administrative Convenience: Logging visitors’ entry, generating pass, scheduling transport, and a number of other administration-related work can be easily carried out from kiosks instead of the main office. It eases the tasks of admin significantly.

Information Sharing: Kiosk computers can effectively act as notice boards for conveying important and/or urgent information to students. For instance, if there is an event, students can register for participation. The crowd and chaos near the admin office can thus be avoided.

Challenges Pertaining to Kiosks

While computing kiosks do make things convenient for both the students and administrators, it comes with its own set of challenges. Controlling students’ activities, maintaining privacy and keeping systems in the ideal working condition is no doubt a burdensome task for IT team. Following are few of the major kiosk-related concerns:

Unauthorized Accessibility: Students may unintentionally end up accessing malicious websites or any official applications installed on kiosk computers. This makes organizational data vulnerable to unauthorized access and data leaks.

Configuration Drifts: Tech-savvy students, especially those in high schools and colleges, frequently change system and network settings for their convenience. In most cases, they forget to reverse the settings after leaving the kiosk resulting in configuration drifts.

Balancing Restriction and Accessibility: Since students’ requirement vary considerably on the basis of the standard and the department they are in, setting adequate restriction is extremely difficult for admins. The challenge is to define varying levels of restrictions for different sets of kiosks.

Benefits of Kiosk Management Software

A public kiosk software is purpose-built to address the challenges pertaining to kiosk management and enables IT team to have effective control over the systems with minimum effort. A good kiosk management software allows you to:

Control accessibility :

Public kiosk software allow admins to define browser and application accessibility for end users. Institutes can restrict students’ access and only allow specific educational applications on the kiosk. Though the major web browsers have the capability to restrict specific websites, users often manage to change the settings as per their requirement. On the contrary, when a kiosk management software is deployed, the settings can be modified only by IT administrators.

Prevent system changes :

IT admins can disable the right click functionality and the ability to access control panel by deploying a kiosk management software. Workstations can thus be totally secured from all undesired changes by end users. In fact, admins can even disable specific features rather than all the functionalities within the control panel or the start menu.

Secure workstations :

Using the kiosk management software, IT team can block downloading and uploading of files as well as lock USB ports to prevent exchange of data through physical drives. Browser restrictions ensure that only required and trusted websites are being accessed to prevent online malware infiltration whereas hardware lock-down prevents the entry of unwanted elements through USB or disk drives, thus ensuring total protection of systems.

Central control :

Deploying a software that facilitates centralized control, enables IT team to manage the kiosks right from their office, irrespective of the campus size. Centralized control is also helpful in active monitoring of student activities. This reduces cases of system malfunction leading to downtime. The central management capacity not only enhances efficiency of IT staff but also improves in-campus experience of students and visitors alike.

Reduce IT Load :

Public kiosk software significantly reduces the load on IT support. It eliminates the need for manual intervention for each and every request. The lock-down and restricted accessibility features of the software relieves IT staff from the burden of regularly re-imaging systems, troubleshooting minor and regular issues, and the like. As a result, the technical staff can invest time in more critical tasks such as upgrading the infrastructure, on-boarding advanced educational applications, and so on.

Deploying a kiosk management software is the best way to realize the benefits of self-service kiosks while averting the shortcomings of multi-user environment. In this regard, selecting a comprehensive solution is crucial to streamline the kiosk management process. Faronics WINSelect is a public kiosk software with end-to-end kiosk management capabilities. It comes with a 30-day free trial and has helped many educational institutes in managing and standardizing their kiosk environment.