1. Student Print Accounting Project Dawn Bush Director of Academic Technology Calvin College

2. What led us to this project?

3. Students doing more printing Growth in use of technology over previous 5-7 years Students doing research online and printing results Faculty building more and more content into Blackboard Use of online textbooks – some students still need to print to study

4. Printing was out of control Hundreds of pages a day printed by students Students abandoning print jobs Cost of student public printing going up 12% to 15% a year Students doing non-course related printing –Printing flyers for their own small businesses –Printing for off-campus non-profit businesses Students from other colleges printing at Calvin No easy way to measure printing

5. Phase 1 Getting ready for print accounting Limit printing to Calvin students only – required logins in all labs Open project with the goal to “limit unnecessary printing”

6. Project requirements Must be –Convenient –Fair –Easy to administer –Cover printing cost for a “typical” student Anticipate “boogey men” –New Activities and Technology Fee of $112.50 per semester –Approvals (Buy-in) Information Services Committee Representative of Student Senate –Information distribution Provost / deans Academic department chairs

7. Phase 2 Research (Spring 2005) Researched hardware and software solutions Purchased and installed a software solution, pCounter Benchmarked printing silently on all student accounts Researched quotas at other colleges

8. What we learned 900,000 pages were printed 3 top students printed –3,391 pages –3,041 pages –2,953 pages Average student printed 250 pages 10% of our students would have exceeded a quota of $25.00 (500 b&w pages)

9. Phase 3 No Charge Pilot (Fall 2005) Established preliminary quotas and charges –$25.00 printing per student (500 b&w pages) $.05 a page $.08 duplex page $.35 per color page Built in 10% or $2.50 allowance for printing errors (i.e. misfeeds)

10. Ran print accounting on all student accounts (no charge) Print accounting window each time a student printed –Indicated their current Student Print Accounting status –The cost of the current print job. –The opportunity to continue to print or cancel the print job

11. Advertised the pilot Calvin Chimes (student newspaper) daily student listserv CIT web pages

12. What we learned When student’s were aware we were tracking printing –Printing didn’t increase usual 12% – 15% –18% reduction in printing from spring semester (900,000 to 727,000 pages) –Only 1.6% of the students would have exceeded a quota of $25.00

13. Phase 4 Implementation (Spring 2006) Ran print accounting on all students (with charges) Minimal issues Project closed and ongoing support passed to HelpDesk

14. What we learned Easier than we thought to get student attention when money is involved 2 student organizations got involved –Calvin Chimes – student newspaper –Student Senate –Policy and Issues Committee Additional 6% reduction (681,000 pages) since fall semester Almost 25% reduction since beginning of project Only 3% of students exceeded the quota –$1,054 collected to help cover costs of public printing Interesting note: enterprising pre-law student

15. Results Met primary goal of limiting unnecessary printing Reduced student printing by over 250,000 pages a semester Estimated to save the college $12,500 a semester

17. Did we meet our project requirements? Our solution –convenient –fair –easy to administer –covers printing cost of a typical student

18. What we did right Long lead-in time –“no surprises” – student’s knew ahead of time –2 semesters to adapt to idea 10% buffer for printing errors –virtually eliminated student complaints Quota of $25.00 –more generous than most other schools –high enough to affect only small portion of student body Implemented in all student labs –all student labs at the same time eliminated students ability to print to areas where charges were not in effect Selected a software solution, pCounter, instead of a hardware solution –far less cumbersome than available hardware

19. Issues we encountered Charging students with new Student Activities and Technology Fee while limiting printing Student employees –Had to find a way for student employees to print to departmental printer while working Faculty/Staff printing to lab computers

20. Resources iPrint –http://www.novell.com/products/netware/pri nting/quicklook.html pCounter –http://www.pcounter.com.au/web/ Calvin iPrint web pages http://www.calvin.edu/it/services/studentn etworkservices/printing/ http://www.calvin.edu/it/services/studentn etworkservices/printing/ Dawn Bush (dcbush@calvin.edu)

21. Questions?