Why Higher Education Uses Content Distribution and Printing Platforms

Digital content distribution and online printing solutions provide higher education with an easy way to share documents and receive physical materials.

Higher education is one sector that is approaching science-fiction levels of innovation thanks to digital libraries like Wikipedia, mobile devices, and e-books, and technologies like 3-D printing. Today’s tech advancements have made it easier to absorb information, pay attention, and complete homework and other assignments.

Colleges and universities, of course, are no stranger to jumping feet first into the future, and in that regard, these educational institutes warmly welcome cloud services and digital platforms. After all, it doesn’t require a degree in rocket science to see that digital content distribution and online printing solutions provide higher education with an easy way to share documents, receive physical materials, and inspire change in teaching methods. However, that’s not all these platforms have to offer in this sector.

Digital content distribution and online print services help colleges and universities do the following.

Reduce spending
There is nothing wrong with personal laser or inkjet printers, especially for the typical college student rushing out an essay the night before the deadline. However, those individuals, their teachers, and university administrators all know that printers can get expensive quickly – ink isn’t cheap, and paper doesn’t grow on trees. By turning to online print services and digital content distribution platforms, higher education can cut costs dramatically.

Scale with ease
If there is one thing for certain in the higher education sector, it’s that colleges and universities continuously grow as more students apply and are accepted year over year. This type of frequent scaling demands print and digital content distribution services that can support more users, more data, and more connected devices on a consistent basis. To meet these demands, many institutions opt for online print solutions and digital document sharing platforms that scale easily in the cloud.

As Forbes contributor Tom Gillis explained, organizations adopt cloud services because instead of bulldozing fields and building data centers, they can sign up for platforms and deploy them in a fraction of the time.

Support mobility
The mobile device craze isn’t going to end any time soon, and if recent trends are an indication of the future, traditional computers will fade into obscurity as tablets become primary devices. This is great news for higher education; an infographic by Mobile Future illustrates how teaching with tablets can save educators around £2.3 billion per year, and that 81 percent of students use mobile devices for educational purposes such as studying.

Cloud-based digital content distribution platforms will become critical to educational institutions, as they enable administrators to share documents with teachers instantly over mobile devices. On top of that, educators can quickly print resources from anywhere and have them delivered the next day; if supplemental teaching materials are required, they can be ordered instantly.

Go green
The environmental benefits of sharing content via Web-hosted platforms are quite obvious, but higher education should also realise that by ordering documents, brochures, posters, and any other physical materials online, they ensure no paper is wasted. Additionally, teachers can always resort to sharing extra-long excerpts or supplemental curricula over the Internet, or vice-versa  – students can send their educators their work.

Educate educators
Administrators will love digital content distribution platforms and printing services, as these solutions allow them to create and disseminate orientation handbooks, workbooks, learning ads, facilitator guides, and course packs. This ensures that educators are always kept up to date on the latest best practices and regulations. As an added benefit, educational institutes can share those training materials online after printing them, so there will be no excuse not to follow protocol.

Higher education embraces technology, and that’s why so many colleges and universities take advantage of cloud-based content distribution and printing platforms. The benefits listed above are just a few of the many reasons why all institutions of further education should be aware of these services.