Colleges and universities are often large, consist of several campus buildings, and have both indoor and outdoor components. With multi-building navigation built into Mappedin’s indoor mapping platform, students and visitors can enjoy seamless indoor-outdoor navigation between campus facilities, providing an enhanced campus experience.

Using Multi-building Navigation in Colleges & Universities

Multi-building navigation is a feature of Mappedin’s Responsive Web App that enables users to populate directions within and between buildings using the most efficient path. When used in colleges and universities, students and visitors can use a digital campus map to search for a location, and seamlessly navigate through indoor and outdoor locations. These include multi-story buildings, dorm rooms, lecture halls, restaurants, washrooms, and more. 

Why Multi-building Navigation for Colleges & Universities is So Effective

Multi-building navigation helps close the loop when navigating between and within campus buildings. Colleges and universities can showcase an outdoor map with all of their buildings and facilities, along with maps of the interior of each building, without compromising the user experience. Students can simply pull up a digital campus map and search for a building or a location within a building, and navigate seamlessly through the indoors and outdoors. 

Why It Is Important for Colleges & Universities

University and college campuses are often large, spread out, and congested, with thousands of students and faculty members navigating through them every day. With multiple buildings, floors, and indoor and outdoor components, it’s easy to get lost, confused, and frustrated on campus while looking for classrooms, facilities, and dorm rooms. This is why multi-building navigation is important. It enables students to get acquainted with a college or university campus, orient themselves within it, and efficiently locate their destination — whether that is a location inside a building or a building complex. Combined with blue dot, students and staff can view their real-time position on the map as they travel through the campus. 

Seamless Outdoor-Indoor Campus Wayfinding

A campus map with an outdoor-indoor navigation system allows students to search, discover, and populate routes between and inside different buildings across campus. With dynamic visuals and intuitive directions, students can effortlessly locate campus facilities and services, and navigate between several buildings, floors, and rooms. 

Benefits of Using Multi-building Navigation

Along with providing seamless outdoor-indoor campus wayfinding, multi-building navigation provides several other benefits. It enhances the campus experience, helps students and visitors find their way around, keeps everyone informed, and creates a smarter campus environment. 

Enhanced Campus Experience

Maps with multi-building navigation enhance the campus experience by equipping students and visitors with a tool to navigate and familiarize themselves with a college or university. Visitors can access school wayfinding through a mobile app, digital directories on-site, or website to avoid getting lost when navigating from dorm rooms to lecture halls and other campus buildings.

Find Your Way

Campus visitors can easily find their way around a college or university campus with multi-building navigation. With the ability to view their real-time location and populate directions between multiple buildings, it becomes stress-free to locate an upcoming class or nearby food vendor. For instance, the University of Ottawa enabled students to search for a professor and receive step-by-step directions directly to their office. As an efficient navigation solution, students can search while on-the-go, or pre-plan their routes before leaving home.

Stay Informed

Different university and college buildings may offer different indoor facilities and amenities. Digital maps with multi-building navigation enable maximum discovery of the varying classrooms, study spaces, and services located within these multi-story buildings. With helpful directions and at-a-glance information at your fingertips, students and visitors can stay informed of campus offerings and how to access them. 

Become a Smarter Campus

Colleges and universities can create a smart and digital campus environment by combining multi-building navigation with an accurate and interactive map. By providing intuitive navigation, digital maps can promote ongoing news, events, and safety bulletins. Moreover, Mappedin’s advanced technology can easily work with your latest software and devices.

Implementing Multi-building Navigation in Colleges & Universities

A multi-building navigation system starts with a digital map. You will want to choose a reliable mapping software provider, like Mappedin, that has extensive experience creating campus maps for facilities of all sizes. The service provider must be able to map both indoor and outdoor spaces, offer seamless outdoor-indoor navigation, and can integrate seamlessly with your existing website and apps. For instance, we configured a sync integration with Mohawk College’s own internal classroom CMS in order to pull information such as categories and tags to help students search for their classes. 

What Sets MappedIn Apart?

Mappedin’s interactive campus maps with multi-building wayfinding allow students to easily locate buildings and the rooms and services within them, while delivering valuable insights back to your college or university. As a leading provider of college and university mapping, navigation, and positioning software, Mappedin is trusted by several colleges and universities including Mohawk College, The University of Calgary, and Bosch University.

Our platform provides powerful indoor-outdoor navigation experiences and the Mappedin CMS serves as the foundational layer. You can make edits to your interactive campus map and deploy changes in real-time across all platforms. Building details and new facilities can all be updated simultaneously across building directories, digital signage, website, and mobile applications. 

Multi-building Navigation for Colleges & Universities FAQs

What Is a Campus Navigation System?

A campus navigation system enables visitors to access step-by-step directions to a requested destination. Using a digital map and blue dot navigation, users can see their real-time location as they move through the campus, providing accurate navigation. If a student strays from their path, the blue dot navigation will update automatically to guide them back on course. 

What Is an Interactive Campus Map?

With a digital campus map, visualizations are interactive, so students and visitors can pan, zoom, and rotate the map to get acquainted with your college or university. As the map moves, so do dynamically displayed elements such as text labels. These features, along with accessibility mode, provide a seamless outdoor-indoor navigation experience for students. 

Why Is It Important to Map the University Campus?

Maps are essential when visiting a college or university because it helps everyone find their way around a campus. Students and visitors can avoid wandering around and confidently navigate between and within multi-story buildings, facilities, and both the indoor and outdoor components. While providing a more intuitive navigation experience, it also ensures maximum visibility of a campus and its offerings. Contact us today to get started.