How to Use Indoor Mapping at Your College or University

Picture this: you’re on the way to your college or university campus for the first time. You’re feeling excited, stressed, and intimidated all at once. Upon arrival, you locate several buildings spanning over several floors, and you start to feel overwhelmed. How am I going to find my way around campus? 

Unfortunately, this is a common problem that students face. Navigating a large campus and between multiple buildings is challenging, and even returning students, visitors, and staff members run into problems trying to locate classrooms, amenities, and services.

This is where indoor mapping comes into play. Not only does it help with navigation, but it can provide a solution to some of the common struggles that students, staff, and visitors face on a daily basis. Let’s take a look at some of these problems.

Find Classrooms, Services or Amenities

“Where is my classroom?”

With a digital interactive campus map, students and staff can locate everything they need, such as classrooms, from their mobile device! An interactive map allows students and visitors to easily search and locate rooms, buildings, amenities, services, and everything else the campus has to offer. From lecture halls, to residence buildings, to food and beverage vendors, students can get turn-by-turn directions around the campus. For instance, Mohawk College implemented Mappedin’s Responsive Web Application to allow students to search for classroom codes and populate directions directly to their classrooms. With a powerful search engine and maps that function across any device, finding an upcoming class or nearby food vendor becomes stress-free.

Pre-Plan Your Route with Multi-Destination Wayfinding

“How do I get from one class to the next?”

In the case that you have back-to-back classes or you’re in a time crunch to make it to an event after class, indoor mapping allows you to pre-plan your route with multi-destination wayfinding! Staff and students can simply enter more than one destination for their journey and the map will create and display the shortest route between the desired multiple stops. This makes it easy to navigate between and inside of different buildings across campus, saving time and reducing late arrivals. Additionally, accessibility mode allows users to see routes that prioritize elevators and ramps over stairs, ensuring inclusivity at your college or university.

Locate Available Study Spaces and Meeting Rooms

“Where can I find and reserve an open desk for studying?”

Indoor mapping is also useful for visualizing and accessing various services on campus such as study spaces and meeting rooms. Integrated with other smart building technology, staff and students can find and reserve available meeting rooms, study areas, desks, or parking spots directly from the map. With blue dot positioning enabled, you can locate the closest available space to your current location, book it, and populate directions directly there. This makes the difficult process of finding and booking desks, parking spots, and other services, an easy task.

Find Out Operating Hours for Indoor & Outdoor Facilities 

“What time does the library close?”

Have you ever been on the way to the bookstore, library, restaurant or a facility on campus, only to find out that it’s closed? With indoor maps, this problem can be avoided! Students, staff, and visitors can locate important information such as operating hours directly from the campus map. For instance, you can click on the library to find out opening and closing times. With the ability to layer on additional experiences such as real-time push-notifications, campuses can also notify individuals of closing times as they walk by the building. This ensures that everyone is aware of operating hours for both indoor and outdoor facilities on campus.

Discover On-Campus News and Events

“When is the job fair?”

With campuses hosting a variety of events, clubs, sports, and services, it becomes difficult to keep track of them all. However, indoor mapping can be utilized to keep students, visitors, and staff updated on campus news and events. With the ability to add real-time updates to your campus map, you can highlight the location of time-sensitive events, such as an eight hour job fair. This technology also allows you to curate pop-up details to indicate additional information such as start times, end times, cancellations, and more. These pop-up details can be relayed to students and staff relevant to their location, so if someone is passing by the job fair, they will receive a personalized notification regarding the event. These notifications are also useful for lecture cancellations, changed meeting times and locations, wi-fi details, and promoting campus news.  

Increase Campus Safety 

“Where can I find an emergency exit?”

In the case of an emergency, indoor maps featured around campus allow students, staff, and visitors to visualize the location of emergency exits, fire extinguishers, campus security, and other security facilities. Paired with the ability to send push notifications, campuses can send emergency notifications to individuals in specific locations. For instance, if there is a fire in the science building, everyone within this building can be sent a notification to evacuate immediately. This ensures that everyone remains safe on campus.

Display Up-To-Date Information 

“Where are the renovations occurring on campus?”

Campuses are constantly undergoing changes to account for new additions, renovations, expansion of services, rearranging classrooms, and more. Without being aware of these changes, staff and students can run into difficulties navigating the campus. As such, it’s important that university and college campuses are equipped with a tool that makes it easy to display up-to-date information. With an indoor mapping platform such as Mappedin, managing and maintaining maps becomes easy. When locations shift or new buildings are added, campuses can make these changes swiftly in real-time with a user-friendly Map Editor. This way, everyone can rely on up-to-date information regarding the location of amenities, classrooms, services, and everything else on campus. 

Click here to keep reading about the benefits of indoor mapping in colleges and universities or learn more about our digital mapping solutions for campuses.