Goethe University Frankfurt Conducts Awareness Campaign to Encourage Campus-Wide Usage of MATLAB and Simulink
“The Campus-Wide License provides extended, effective, and flexible learning opportunities for students; enables virtually limitless research for our faculty; and simplifies administration for the University IT Center staff.”
Challenge
Give students and lecturers at Germany’s third-largest university easy access to MATLAB and Simulink
Solution
Acquire a Campus-Wide License, and work with MathWorks to plan and conduct an awareness campaign that combines traditional and digital media with in-person events
Results
- Adoption target achieved months ahead schedule
- Professors focused on teaching, not licensing issues
- Students given freedom to work anywhere
Goethe University Frankfurt’s MATLAB portal.
Goethe University Frankfurt is Germany’s third-largest university, with more than 48,000 students and 3,000 faculty and academic staff, as well as 2,000 administrative staff, across its five campuses. The university recently acquired a Campus-Wide License for MATLAB®, Simulink®, and 50 toolboxes. The license gives students, lecturers, and researchers easy access to a common set of tools used in many disciplines, including economics and business administration, medicine, life sciences, geoscience, and computer science and mathematics.
To ensure that the campus community took full advantage of the new license, the University IT Center worked with MathWorks to develop an awareness campaign that included on-campus events, an online portal, and social media activities. The campaign was led by Dr. Simone Beetz, public relations manager for the IT Center at Goethe University Frankfurt.
“The MathWorks team made it really easy to set up the awareness campaign and arrange training sessions,” says Dr. Beetz. “We appreciated the exchange of ideas, the resources they shared with us, and the ability to bring forward our own viewpoints—all of which helped us exceed our objectives for the campaign.”
Challenge
Previously, each department at Goethe University Frankfurt managed its own software license. As a result, some students and lecturers lacked access to the software they needed. In addition, students typically could only use the software in the computer labs. The University IT Center wanted to make it easier for faculty and staff to access the software. They also wanted to reduce the administrative burden of maintaining department-level licenses. To address these issues, the University IT Center decided to provide centrally administered, campus-wide access to MATLAB and Simulink.
The IT Service Center staff wanted to make sure that existing students and faculty members, as well as all incoming students, learned that MATLAB and Simulink were available to them anywhere on campus.
Solution
Goethe University Frankfurt acquired a Campus-Wide License for MATLAB and Simulink and teamed with MathWorks specialists to create an awareness campaign that combined traditional and digital media across multiple communication channels.
One of the benefits of the Campus-Wide License is a MATLAB portal that provides easy access to software downloads, online training, and technical support resources. Goethe University was the first in Europe to launch the MATLAB Portal. Dr. Beetz and her group referenced the portal in all communications that they delivered to the university community, including email announcements disseminated via deans’ offices and student councils, social media posts, and multimedia displays across campus, as well as flyers, posters, and other traditional print media.
The group participated in several events in which they met students and faculty in person. These events included a fair for all students in their first semester, a welcome day for international students, and a Night of Science event for life sciences students, lecturers, and Frankfurt residents. They also hosted a training seminar, led by MathWorks engineers and attended mostly by graduate and doctoral students, that provided an interactive introduction to MATLAB for specific applications.
As part of the campaign, Dr. Beetz and her group underscored the availability of MathWorks online training and tutorials on machine learning, deep learning, and MATLAB for financial applications, among other topics.
The group is soliciting feedback from students and faculty to inform next year’s awareness campaign activities, which will target both incoming students and current students who have yet to take advantage of the license.
Results
- Adoption target achieved months ahead schedule. “When we started the awareness campaign, we set a goal of 1,000 individual users on the license by the end of the first semester,” says Dr. Beetz. “Thanks to the assistance we received from MathWorks and the effectiveness of the campaign, we achieved that goal ahead of time and saw increased activations every month for the rest of the year.”
- Professors focused on teaching, not software access. “Exercises with MATLAB have been firmly integrated into my courses on applied geophysics for several years,” says Dr. Andreas Junge, professor of geosciences at Goethe University Frankfurt. “The introduction of the campus license made it easier for me to concentrate on teaching because all students can now access MATLAB easily.”
- Students given freedom to work anywhere. “We have received lots of positive feedback from students as well as lecturers on the Campus-Wide License,” says Dr. Beetz. “Among the most valued aspects for the students is the freedom to use MATLAB and Simulink at home or anywhere on campus instead of solely in a computer lab.”
Acknowledgements
Goethe University Frankfurt provides campus-wide training through MATLAB Academic Online Training Suite. This portfolio of self-paced online courses covers a range of topics and is used to increase productivity, support multidisciplinary projects, and enhance student skills.
