The University of the Americas Puebla (UDLAP) is a Mexican institution of higher education. It was founded 80 years ago and is considered as the number one private educational institution in the country with 5 QS stars. The educational institution is home to about 15,000 people, of which 9,000 are undergraduate students. During the pandemic, they chose Awingu to give access to their remote desktop computers to its staff and students.
Benefits
- Remote access for students and staff: Due to COVID-19 the UDLAP campus has been closed for almost a year, and 100% of the courses are given online right now. To give their students access to the software that they need to follow their classes – and which are, of course, a part of the tuition they pay – the university chose Awingu’s digital workspace. In practice, this means that students take over on-campus PCs (as explained in this blog post) from the comfort of their home, with their own device, via a browser.
- Highly secure: “We had academic staff lobbying for a VPN connection. We consider VPN as a secure tunnel to a potentially insecure computer – it is a potential tunnel for malware and other threats. The IT staff very strongly argued against VPN and looked for a secure and user-friendly alternative – and found Awingu”, Raul (IT admin) says.
- BYOD: since the software runs on the powerful university computers, the students are not limited by their own laptop’s horsepower: “a student with a cheap notebook can run heavily demanding applications for educational purposes now – and that is great,” Raul adds. “Furthermore, we don’t need to manage their device and thus don’t lose sleep over what happens on it – if it’s infected with a virus, it will never reach our infrastructure.”
- Simplicity: Since thousands of students and professors alike have become Awingu power users pretty much overnight, Raul is surprised that he does not face any problems or support tickets: “It rarely happens that someone asks a question – and the staff is unanimously positive about it.” UDLAP’s “Awingu training” is, therefore, minimal: they taught professors how the solution works, and how they need to address it to their students. Afterwards, the professors show their students, and that is that. “At first, the academic staff – especially the older ones – sighed: ‘oh no, a new thing that I need to explain to my students.’,” Raul laughs, “but they were relieved when they saw how simple Awingu is. In fact, I cannot imagine a simpler way to tackle this issue, both for us as admins and for the users.”
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