Hoteling is green!

Hoteling is the practice of providing office space to employees on an as-needed rather than on the traditional, constantly reserved basis. This reduces the amount of physical space an enterprise needs, lowering overhead cost while ensuring office resources for employees.

UTS hoteling spaces include:

1762 Clifton: Room E142 and several cubes

Cox Hall: Permanent touchdown space within the lab, but no formal hoteling

EUH Midtown: No space identified permanently

North Decatur Building: Two new cubes on the Fifth Floor

Woodruff Library: Pending cubicle realignment

1599 Clifton: No space identified

At Emory’s Center for Interactive Teaching, part of UTS, we help faculty, students and staff in successfully using technology as part of teaching and research. One of the tools we help with is videoconferencing. We have seen the number of people using videoconferencing increase, and with Emory’s effort to increase sustainability and reduce costs, we see this growth to continue.

As an example, today’s videoconferencing schedule (March 31st) began at 7:30 am and continued, with only a few minutes between events, until 3:45 this afternoon. Today was not only busy, but was comprised of some very interesting events. The first videoconference connected a doctor from the Carter Center with people in six other locations within the United States and South Africa, including Cape Town.

Two and a half hours later, we connected some researchers from the Yerkes Primate Research Center with a group from the University of Utah Health Science Center in Salt Lake City. Then, beginning at 12:45, we have the regularly scheduled class on Native American literature and culture using videoconferencing to connect students and instructors at Emory with their other classmates and co-instructors at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Oklahoma. The last scheduled videoconference of the day is another regularly scheduled videoconference that brings students from a Chinese language class at Emory together with students in the same class from Oxford College, virtually.

By the end of the day, ECIT's videoconferencing services will have spanned close to 10,000 miles in a total of about seven hours. Using videoconferencing on this day has provided a tremendous savings both in the impact to the environment and also in economic costs. We can only foresee the demand for these services to continue to rise. Currently, a group of us from Academic Technology Services is working with Emory’s Office of Sustainability in an effort to make sure the University realizes and takes advantage of this environmentally green resource.

You can learn more about ECIT’s videoconferencing resources by going to the Centers for Educational Technology (CET) website (cet.emory.edu), clicking on the “Resources” link, and then choosing “University Resources.” Videoconferencing is one of the resources listed on this page.

- Wayne Morse, Director Emory's Center for Interactive Teaching

In the Fall of 2007, the Centers for Educational Technology team, CET, applied for an Incentives Fund Grant from the Office of Sustainability Initiatives to test the feasibility of installing duplex printers in several of our labs. At the time, double-sided printing was not widely available to students and the risk of paper jams and technical problems from the printer hardware made us a little uncertain as to how this would work, especially in our unstaffed labs.

With the awarded grant funds, we were able to purchase three duplex units for existing printers in the Computing Center at Cox Hall and the Callaway Graduate Lab, as well as a printer with a duplex unit for Emory’s Center for Interactive Teaching. A corresponding poster campaign was launched at the start of the semester to encourage double-sided printing, with the added incentive of a discounted price on double-sided pages. 

Data from CET printers that Fall showed not only a dramatic increase in overall printing in our labs as compared to the previous Fall 2006, but a substantial percentage of those pages were being printed double-sided (37% double-sided Fall 2007). We also found that hardware and paper jam problems were minimal and as a result purchased additional duplex units for all of our lab printers.

This past Fall 2008, we installed a new print management system across the campus called Pharos Uniprint. With this system, we can easily see printing stats from all Pharos managed public printers on campus, not just CET spaces, and can measure what impact providing the double-sided option to students has had on overall paper consumption.

Campus-wide, well over 2 million pages have been printed on Pharos managed printers since the start of the Fall ’08 semester. Of those pages, 526,230 were double-sided, roughly 23% (CET managed labs averaged 35%). That’s 1,053 reams of paper saved - an estimated 66 trees! 

Thanks to the Incentive Grant funds and the new print management system, the CET has been able to provide an easy way for students to practice more sustainable printing habits and quickly see what a difference that can make.  

- Kim Braxton, Manager Emory Centers for Educational Technology