The Challenges

In recent years, the substantial increase in student number has led to the significant shortage of computer teaching studio not only in its number but also with the right seating capacity. Unless immediate measures are to be taken, the situation will undoubtedly be worsened for the years to come. Without the allocation of additional space, extra teaching studios can only come from the conversion of open-access terminal rooms (which are solely used by students for their course work and self-study), and the increase of seating capacity can merely be achieved by replacing the existing larger computer desks with relatively smaller ones.

According to past experience, teaching studios are heavily demanded during term time, and therefore, students practically have little chance to make use of the machines in these studios. Besides, those students who must use software or courseware that can only be accessible from PCs in the Terminal Areas of the Computing Services Centre (CSC) will be most hard hit as there will be less open-access computers available.

Moreover, security has always been a major concern in end-user computing today. In order to protect users from attack, software developers have designed complicated security infrastructure and implemented a large number of security features in their products. The resulting systems or applications, especially operating systems (e.g. Windows XP SP2) and antivirus tools (e.g. McAfee), are getting much bigger in size and thus requiring more resources and longer time to start up. The situation may become intolerable for large teaching studios when hands-on tutorials can start only when all machines have been booted up.

The Project

The CSC tackles the above challenges by