Bring your own device

Bring your own device ( BYOD ) is the term used to describe the integration of private mobile devices such as laptops , tablets or smartphones into the networks of companies or schools, universities, libraries and other (educational) institutions. This also includes organizational guidelines that regulate the way in which employees, schoolchildren or students may use their own electronic office equipment for work or school purposes, in particular for access to network services and the processing and storage of internal organizational or company data.

BYOD is intended to give users greater freedom of choice and enable the organization to better focus on personal needs. In the education sector, BYOD offers economic and ecological potential: Instead of schools and universities having to purchase their own (university) equipment at a cost, the increasingly privately available equipment of learners should also be able to be used for school purposes.

Another approach is the concept of Corporate Owned, Personally Enabled (COPE), in which employees are given their own device for private use.

Risks

BYOD can pose a security risk for organizations, as it means that data from the organization is processed on external devices that are not or only partially controllable and these devices can also move in the organization's internal network and disrupt or spy on it. One of the risk factors are the users themselves, who can cause security gaps due to a lack of information, operating errors or carelessness, for example by not installing security updates. BYOD also runs counter to the strategy of standardizing the IT infrastructure . It is feared that BYOD increases the complexity and thus the operating costs.

In addition to security issues, BYOD raises legal problems: the data protection of personal data to be processed and trade and business secrets must be preserved. The legal liability in the event that BYOD devices are damaged during use or damage or disrupt other devices must be clarified.

BYOD guidelines allow certain hurdles such as VPNs , hard disk encryption or even limited service offers. Often pure virtual desktop infrastructures , terminal servers or web applications (mostly webmail ) that do not save any data on the devices are also allowed.

Personal restrictions

Under certain circumstances, users must allow the organization to make settings on the private devices that guarantee the security of the organization data and the organization network. Depending on whether and to what extent the organization financially contributes to the devices, costs are also shifted to the users. An organization that allows the use of private devices may save on the procurement of end devices.

In addition, BYOD use can lead to increased or constant availability.

Situation in Germany

The open working group "Bring Your Own Device" of the IT planning council aims to initiate an exchange of experiences and to show interested administrations ways under which framework conditions the use of private mobile devices in administration can make sense. The Federal Office for Information Security is involved in this.

BYOD in school

43 percent of all teachers think BYOD makes sense. According to a forsa study, 48 percent consider BYOD to be superfluous. The benefits of BYOD are also being questioned outside of school. In this context, the “Alliance for humane education - waking up with digital media” refers, for example, to the Hamburg project “BYOD - Start in the Next Generation” and the OECD study “Students, Computers and Learning: Making the Connection” . In the OECD study “Students, Computers and Learning: Making the Connection”, those pupils who only learned moderately with digital media showed the best results in subject teaching. Pupils who studied with a PC very often in school often showed less learning success in central exams and comparative tests than pupils who rarely learned on a PC, according to OECD Education Director Andreas Schleicher.

According to Wilfried Bos, the PISA special evaluation “Students, Computers and Learning” has shown that countries that have invested a lot of money in IT equipment in their schools by international standards have not succeeded in improving the performance of their students in the areas of reading skills To significantly improve math or science.

Learning with digital school platforms

According to the will of the Conference of Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs, the pupils should learn systematically in digital learning environments with their digital devices from summer 2018. But so far the federal states have not succeeded in developing suitable school platforms.

Further meaning of the term

Business class seat with tablet holder instead of a personal screen

In passenger transport, the term stands for the trend towards supplementing or replacing electronic information and entertainment systems permanently connected to the vehicle through the use of personal devices. So offer z. B. instead of the screen installed in the front seat, airlines offer streaming options to the passenger's personal mobile phone via WiFi (see picture).

See also

• Mobile device management

Web links

• The term BYOD in Beats Biblionetz
• BYOD guidelines from BITKOM (Federal Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media eV)
• BYOD smartphone project for STEM teaching
• Mobile devices in the classroom: "Bring Your Own Device"

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Sascha Wellershoff: Mobile working endangers IT security. Online article. In: Springer Professional. Springer Fachmedien (Wiesbaden), March 9, 2020, accessed on July 16, 2020 . 
2. ↑ Decision 2015/25 of the IT planning council ( BAnz AT 08/19/2015 B1 ).
3. ↑ forsa (2014). IT in schools: results of a representative survey of teachers in Germany. Berlin: forsa.
4. ↑ DigitalPakt Schule der Kultusminister: Errweg der Bildungspolitik. Retrieved June 27, 2017 . 
5. ^ Students, Computers and Learning: Making the Connection. Retrieved June 27, 2017 . 
6. ↑ Anyone who learns on the computer is not always smarter. Retrieved June 27, 2017 . 
7. ↑ School digital - the country indicator 2015. Accessed on June 27, 2016 . 
8. ↑ Education in the digital world. Strategy of the Standing Conference. Retrieved June 27, 2017 . 
9. ↑ There is a threat of a debacle like the one at BER: the federal states are making a fool of themselves when building digital school platforms. Retrieved June 8, 2018 .