Since BlueJeans was introduced to the U-M community in 2014—thanks to a consortium of seven units that were early adopters—campus has found creative ways to use the service to connect users anywhere, anytime, and from almost any device.
Since then, the use of BlueJeans on campus has skyrocketed. In fiscal year 2017, over 115,000 meetings connected almost 400,000 people. “We are thrilled that BlueJeans has proven to be such a useful tool for teaching and learning,” said Alok Vimawala, ITS director of business services and BlueJeans service owner. “When the U-M community works together and decides to adopt a single tool, we can leverage our institutional scale to provide it to everyone on campus.”
An infographic shows how much BlueJeans usage has increased across U-M
Todd Austin, videoconferencing lead at LSA Instructional Support Services, uses BlueJeans to connect global classrooms in ways that vastly improve the learning and research experience. Under Todd’s leadership, LSA led the university in adopting BlueJeans as the standard cloud service for videoconferencing, which is now managed centrally by ITS.
Always room for improvement
ITS continues to develop campuswide solutions to enhance the use of BlueJeans. They are working closely with the Office of the Vice President and General Counsel (OGC) and other security groups to make the service HIPAA-compliant, a key factor in its use in clinical settings that handle protected health information. ITS is also creating voice infrastructure to support five-digit dialing on campus.
At HITS, BlueJeans is used as a powerful educational tool among expert clinicians, medical students, and patients. A team led by Rob Levitt, senior manager for digital workplaces at HITS, has implemented BlueJeans Primetime to live-stream grand rounds, a weekly lecture that presents medical problems and treatment to a large audience. These grand round sessions can be viewed live in real-time or on demand. They also use the BlueJeans iPad app in the Newborn Intensive Care Unit (NICU) and to help Michigan Visiting Nurses transition patients to homecare.
