Computing on campus

Please see facilities for students. This lists the public computer rooms and computer classrooms with the facilities that are in each area.

No. Visitors can only use IT at LSE if they are from an institution participating in JANET Roaming, and have a laptop or other wireless-enabled device.

Please see public room and computer room opening hours.

The computer classrooms are all located in St Clements building, where IT facilities are available to all students when the room is not booked for teaching. Please see timetables. Please note that this is only available during term time.

You should not save files directly onto the C: drive or the desktop of a public room or classroom PC. The user profiles get deleted from these PCs regularly throughout the day, so if you saved something to the desktop it will not be there once you have logged off. Please ensure that you save files to your H: space.

This depends on where the faulty piece of equipment is.

Staff offices or PhD study rooms and departmental PC rooms

If you find a PC or printer that is faulty in a staff office or a PhD/departmental computer room you can do the following:

• E-mail the IT Service Desk or call x5000
• Visit the IT Service Desk (Walk In Centre, Library 1st Floor)

Please tell IT staff the room number, PC or printer number and what the problem is. 

Teaching rooms and lecture theatres

If you find a PC or any AV equipment that is faulty in a teaching room or lecture theatre you can do the following:

• E-mail the Teaching & Learning Spaces team  or call x5300/5400

Please tell staff the room number, PC or equipment number and what the problem is.

Public PC areas and computer classrooms

If you find a PC or printer that is faulty in a public room or computer classroom you can do the following:

• E-mail the IT Help Desk or call x5000
• Visit the IT Help Desk (Walk In Centre, Library 1st Floor)

Please tell IT staff the room number, PC or printer number and what the problem is.

Yes, the public PCs on campus allow students to listen to lectures but only through headphones. Please plug your headphones into the socket on the front of your PC. Check volume is on.

No, DTS does not rent out laptops to students.

However, there are laptops available in the library under the i-roam scheme. See the i-roam webpage for details.

Use of the i-roam service is governed by the Conditions of Use of IT Facilities.

DTS rolls out an update to the LSE desktop once a year, during the summer. This provides the opportunity to install new, upgraded and amended software to all teaching rooms and open access student PCs.

Teaching staff will be contacted during Winter term to discuss requirements for the following academic session. The beginning of Spring term is the deadline for academic support staff to finalise the information they need in order to introduce new or significantly upgraded software for the desktop in the following academic year.

It may be possible to implement minor upgrades and alterations during the Winter break. Requests should be discussed with the Service Desk as soon as possible, and any agreement finalised by the beginning of October.

All PCs are connected to the LSE network. Please use your logon if you are on the LSE domain. Otherwise, you need to know the name of the PC in order to logon with generic details.

The easiest way to find out the name of the PC is at the logon screen click on ‘to logon to a different domain’, this will reveal the PC name and you can log on using the details below: 

Username: *computername*\GUESTLEC

Password: HELLO

Please note: The password is case sensitive, so type it as displayed above, in capitals.

Videoconferencing is a means of video and audio communication to people in different locations across the developed world. This could be a meeting between two locations or between several sites simultaneously. We have held videoconferences between the UK and Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, America and the Far East.

Our dedicated videoconference suite has the facilities to allow us to connect to remote sites using a dial-up basis via ISDN lines as well as using what is known as Internet Protocol (IP). IP calls travel across the internet rather than via telephone lines.

Both technologies have their positive and negative points, and you would need to decide which is best for you. Depending on the resources available at the other site, or sites, this question could already be answered for you.

At present, IP calls are not available to external clients due to the terms and conditions imposed by our network provider.

Videoconferencing can be used:

• to hold meetings,
• to carry out interviews,
• to give seminars,
• to teach.

When videoconferencing is used for teaching it is often more effective for small groups of students at each site. Lectures can be delivered from large lecture theatres, although other factors involving lighting and audio affect the call quality.

It is also possible to share computer applications over videoconferencing links to enable participants to view presentations and documents at each site and to make changes as required.

Over the last few years within LSE videoconferencing has been used for:

a) meetings between two or more sites saving time and travel

• committee meetings
• working in collaborative groups between two or more universities
• examiners' meetings
• interviewing potential candidates from other parts of the world

b) seminars and conferences

• participation in remote seminars
• giving papers to remote conferences
• telemedicine conferences with live links into operating theatres.

c) teaching and learning

• discussion amongst a distributed group
• giving or receiving specially-broadcast lectures
• small group teaching
• telemedicine training

There is a state of the art videoconference suite in Tower One, available to all members of staff, students and external clientele.

Charges for hire, staffing, and call costs are available here.

Other departments may have their own facilities - we do not support these, and cannot comment on or provide any assistance with them.

You do not need to have any knowledge if you just wish to make a videoconference call - the AV Unit will provide you with a step by step guide on how to use the equipment, and where we can, will start your call, and be on call for the duration of the event for you.

If you wish to know more, please contact us, and we will try to help.

 ISDN: (Integrated Services Digital Network)

ISDN-based videoconferencing provides a guaranteed picture and audio quality at a known price. It is therefore mainly suited for group meetings, long-distance interviewing and similar applications where high-quality audio and reasonable-to-good quality picture is necessary.

ISDN is supported by telecoms service providers throughout the UK, Europe, North America, the Far East and Australia.

The ISDN service is designed to provide reasonably high data transmission rates for digital data and its digital telephone links can be used to support videoconferencing. Each ISDN channel provides 64 kilobits of data per second (kbps). At least two ISDN channels are used for videoconferencing (ISDN-2), hence for links in UK the cost is twice that of a voice telephone call.

ISDN videoconferencing between more than two sites will require the use of a Multipoint Control Unit (MCU). Each site calls the MCU site, and its location will determine the cost of the call. There may also be charges for the use of the MCU depending upon the service provider. The MCU normally operates with voice-activated picture switching while maintaining open audio between all the sites in the videoconference.

Internet Protocol (IP) videoconferencing

IP (Internet Protocol) videoconferencing is more widely used to communicate between individuals where the quality of the picture is not so critical. This technology is currently free to the user since it uses the Internet, but does not provide a guaranteed picture and audio quality as it is dependent on Internet traffic, which varies enormously.

At present, IP calls are not available to external clients due to the terms and conditions imposed by our network provider.

The Audio Visual Unit look after the facilities in our videoconference room. Should you require assistance, please contact us: 020 7107 5400 | dts.av.support@lse.ac.uk