New printing system successful, follow up discussion held today
As a follow up to the new printing quota system, an all-campus forum was held at noon today, Thursday, Mar. 5 in the Reid ballroom to discuss the GoPrint system.
“The campus community will be able to openly provide and discuss feedback, which will help the College to fine-tune the program,” said Whitman College Technology Services (WCTS) Middleware Analyst Mike Osterman.
One of the changes made due to early feedback was the incentive to print double-sided, which would cost $0.01 less per two pages.
“The key thing is that we want to encourage conservation of printing ad so we just want some general feedback on the system,” said Associate to the President and Chair of the Conservation and Recycling Committee. Jed Schwendiman. “We would also love to make adjustments and fix things that aren’t working. If there are changes that need to be made, we want to do those pro-actively.”
“This is the first time we’ve seen a dramatic change in behavior which is pretty exciting,” said Schwendiman.
“Compared to the same point in time last semester, we’ve seen a 42 percent reduction in printing in general access facilities,” said Osterman.
There also used to be a substantial amount of abandoned print jobs, where people would forget to pick up what they printed.
“Now that students must consciously release a print job, there has been a drastic reduction in abandoned jobs,” said Osterman. “This has resulted in 46 reams, which is 500 hundred sheets of paper, being saved that would have otherwise been wasted, either because students have decided to cancel a job or because it has been automatically cleared from the system after not being claimed for 24 hours.”
Most importantly, the system will not undergo any fundamental changes, like changing the $60 amount, until the system has run for an entire semester.
“It’s important that students report problems they encounter not only so we can resolve the issues, but so we can credit their free printing account if they were charged for an unsuccessful print job,” said Osterman. “Since the start of the semester, we’ve issued 34 credits.”
Today’s forum will be followed by a second one later in the semester.
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For those at the forum today, you’ll note that the numbers here don’t quite match up. The stats for the interview were generated a week prior. The updated stats from the forum are:
reduction in printing: 40%
paper saved: 50 reams (25,000 sheets)
number of credits issued since the start of the semester: 46