Campus Events Calendar with Events Crier
Academic silos are today’s norm. Every department, every unit is booked solid. The College of Fine Arts can’t be expected to know what the Athletics Department is doing. The admissions office can’t keep tabs on the med school. And who knows what all those extracurricular clubs and organizations have going on?
But what about the undecided student, the visiting prospective students and their families, or the community member looking for a fun night out? How can they see the hundreds of options a campus affords them?
Advanced Kiosks, one of the world’s largest producers and innovators of self-service kiosks, has the answer. Events Crier is a brand new, easy-to-use web application that aggregates event information across even the largest universities. It quickly shows the public the depth and breadth of all an organization has to offer. Admissions offices can easily add a link to their universities’ Events Crier calendar page to outgoing emails, allowing prospective students to peruse all on-campus events.
Events Crier runs on any Advanced Kiosks’ model and does not require management software, but the real beauty of the application is how it unifies a campus without creating more work for anyone. Universities can sync as many calendars as they want, but each calendar remains owned and updated by its authoring unit. Events Crier integrates all the calendars into an attractive, user-friendly interface to be browsed by date and/or department. Kiosk users can quickly and easily page through all events or search by keyword. Each event listing features a description and contact information. Events Crier encourages students to break out of their comfort zones, exploring and engaging in different areas of campus life. The improved publicity can increase attendance at all kinds of university events.
Events Crier uses iCalendar protocol, the calendar data exchange standard. That means it is compatible with the popular calendar systems campus communities are already using. Department chairs, coaches and faculty advisers simply plug the public URL from their Windows, Apple, Google, or Yahoo Calendar (just to name a few) into Events Crier, sit back and let it sync automatically with their institution-wide event repository.
“We designed Events Crier at the request of several of our higher education customers,” says Advanced Kiosks president and owner Howard Horn. “This software will connect everyone across campus, and it doesn’t have to be viewed only on your kiosks; it’s compatible with mobile devices. Smartphone-dependent students will love having instant access to every campus offering.”