A student at UCLA has gone viral on social media, posting a how-to video detailing the campus’ COVID-19 test vending machine. As campuses across the country continue their efforts to provide safety measures for students, a COVID test vending machine certainly ranks among the more innovative ideas.

Loyola University New Orleans and Sodexo have partnered to launch a Swipe Out Hunger initiative for the Loyola campus community. Swipe Out Hunger, a popular meal donation program on campuses across the country, enables students to donate meal swipes from their dining plans to a campus swipe bank to be used by students in need.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has installed MorphoWave readers to enable biometric access to campus recreation facilities. The initiative is being spearheaded by UNC Campus Recreation, and has introduced an optional, contactless system for student entry to facilities.

Like many institutions across the country, Suffolk University required students and staff to be vaccinated, or obtain an exemption, in order to return to campus in the fall. So the university developed a way to leverage its campus card access control system to ensure that student vaccine status is in keeping with the university’s protocols for facility access.

Penn State has launched a new student engagement mobile app for its campus community designed to help undergraduates, regardless of their college or campus, extend their learning with out-of-classroom experiences. The Engagement App is a university-wide platform that connects students with the wide range of engagement experiences available to them at Penn State.

A federal judge in Wisconsin has backed the side of state laws restricting the use of college student ID cards for voter identification. The decision comes after government watchdog group Common Cause in Wisconsin filed a lawsuit claiming that the requirements placed on student ID cards were too stringent.

Humboldt State is adding a new, mobile payment method for parking on campus with the start of the spring semester. The university will launch of the Passport Parking App for its students and campus constituents that will feature a contactless mobile payment system, as well as remote meter top up and other convenience features.

The University of Rhode island has turned to Automatic Laundry, a laundry service provider to the colleges and universities in the Northeast, to integrate the company’s proprietary LaundryConnect Pay app. LaundryConnect is a closed-loop mobile payment system, which will now tie into the University of Rhode Island’s existing campus card system.

An ongoing dining services push at the State University of New York at Buffalo is reinforcing the utility of self-service checkout and the mobile technology that powers it. The university is improving the food service experience using the GET app from longtime partner CBORD, as well as Nextep kiosks and Oracle’s Micros Simphony POS.

A new identification system at Western University in London, Ontario is providing university branded lanyards and hard plastic Western ONECard holders to every main campus student, employee, and campus visitor. The lanyard and card holders are for visual identification only, with no connection to vaccination status or other factors, and are optional.