Feeling Hot, Hot, Hot: Augmenting Computer Labs with Hot Desks

Is continuing investment in on-site computer labs still a requirement for schools and universities? If every student walks into your building with a laptop under their arm, do you still need labs? How do you meet the needs of students who don’t have a laptop, or students with devices that get lost, stolen, or broken? How do you handle operating system conflicts between what the faculty member uses and what the student owns? For faculty who use computer labs in an instructional context, how do you ensure they can readily observe student work? At the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia, we conducted a “hot desk” pilot in spring 2023 to answer some of these questions. We provided students with a limited number of 32-inch docking monitors, allowing them to use their own device with a full-size display, mouse, and keyboard. We tracked this usage via both quantitative (tracking the hours the devices were in use) and qualitative (surveying students about their experience) methods. We also compared this usage to the demand on our traditional computer lab workstations. We’re using this data to better inform future decisions on capital expenditures for lab computers, and rethinking the way we provide hardware and software to our students.