WEST LAFAYETTE,
Ind. (AP) - Purdue University is moving to block Netflix and other popular
streaming services in classrooms, an attempt to focus on academics while
reducing the university’s broadband usage.
Purdue students
returning from spring break on March 18 will no longer have access to
bandwidth-consuming sites like movie and TV service Netflix, gaming site
Steam and music streaming site Pandora, The Journal & Courier reported.
Social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat, won’t be
blocked.
“This is aimed at
what’s considered recreational streaming,” said Julie Kercher-Updike,
Purdue’s deputy chief information officer. “It’s really about making it so
streaming doesn’t take away from giving academic resources first priority.”
The university will
create designated spaces in academic buildings where students can access the
streaming sites.
Purdue President
Mitch Daniels launched efforts in 2018 to reduce the university’s broadband
services, which had seen five times the consumption and prices double over
four years.
The university
conducted a week-long study of Wi-Fi traffic in two of its largest lecture
halls and found that just 4 percent of data was downloaded from sites deemed
“academic,” while 34 percent was from sites deemed “likely non-academic.”
“When it’s purely
recreational, especially during class hours, I think it raises some
questions,” Daniels said at the time.
The university
tested filtering sites in the fall and spring and saw bandwidth usage drop.
Blackboard, a university site used for assignments and grading, jumped from
being the No. 78 most used site in one of the lecture halls to being ranked
in the top 10, said Mark Sonstein, Purdue’s executive director of IT
infrastructure services.
The pilot included
information on how to file a complaint about the filtering, but the
university received little criticism, said Kercher-Updike.
“We just have not
seen the push back we thought we would see,” she said.
Michael Graham, a
junior studying engineering, said he didn’t notice any changes to the class
he had that experienced the test filtering.
“I’m not in there
to watch movies or anything,” Graham said. “I really don’t know anyone else
who does, either. ... So, I guess I don’t have a problem with it.”