Innovations

University students and corporate employees
use cashless currency at lunch counters and laundromats

Photo courtesy of Western Illinois University Tera Monroe, a senior at Western Illinois University in Macomb, likes using the value-stored cards to do her laundry and to make purchases on campus. "I don't have to carry a lot of change around and deal with quarters getting stuck in the machines," she says.

Future-oriented universities and corporations are beginning to use value-stored plastic cards for most cash transactions. As for students, their universal call home — "Mom, Dad, send cash!" — is changing to "Mom, Dad, add value to my card!" The effect on Mom's and Dad's checkbook is the same, but the currency is plastic. And Joe Pigott of Debitek, the company installing the technology that translates cash to card, says in five years banks will probably be issuing prepaid cards along with ATM and credit cards. Western Illinois University in Macomb is using the cashless card system. At WIU students or their parents give the university the amount of money a student is expected to need for the semester, and the university programs a magnetic strip on the card with information about the student and his account. (The card doubles as the student's I.D.) Students can use the cards for food in the residences, for snacks and fast food from Hardee's in the Union, for laundry and in all vending machines.

The same technology is at work in corporations such as Motorola, which has nearly 18,000 employees in Illinois. Leigh Reeves, a management information specialist, says the cashless cards are used for purchases in the cafeteria and exclusively in all of the company's vending machines. Employees can feed cash — from $1 to $20 — and a card that resembles an ATM bank card into a machine, and that dollar value is added to the card. Each time the employee makes a purchase, the price is subtracted.

Reeves says the cards can be programmed to give back more, or less, than the amount of cash put on. As an incentive to use the card system, she says, Motorola gives employees a 5 percent bonus, which amounts to getting a $21 value for each $20 put on the card.

Reeves says the transaction takes less time than paying cash. "The 'card only' line in our cafeteria is almost always empty" because it takes two to three times as long to complete a transaction using cash.

Customers and vendors like the system because the money is paid up front. Reeves says that in one recent month Motorola was able to deposit for interest $332,000 that under the cash/coin system would have been sitting idle in machines or in a company safe.

PLATO goes private;
NovaNET now into the Web

NovaNET, the computer-based instructional system that evolved from the University of Illinois' PLATO, has added access to the Internet with a user-friendly interface to help educators and students find resources on the World Wide Web. Also, a Windows Portal allows educators and students with Windows software to access NovaNET lessons.

Since the U of I turned over operations of NovaNET to a private company, University Communications Inc. in Tucson, Ariz., there has been an "explosion of new developments for NovaNET," says Brendan McGinty, director of operations and development. In addition to the Internet access and Windows Portal, more than 600 new programs have been added to a curriculum that offers more than 10,000 hours of instruction to students. Now NovaNET delivers more than 1.5 million hours of instruction each year to students throughout the country.

Ellen Spycher, literacy coordinator for Project READ in Decatur, a program that has used NovaNET for 10 years, says that students at any level are comfortable with NovaNET. "It is particularly helpful for students who learn visually and kinesthetically," she says.

But perhaps more telling for the future, Spycher says that, with NovaNET, "the adult student also becomes familiar with a tool, the computer, which is often a prerequisite for success in the workplace."

Beverley Scobell

4/September 1995/Illinois Issues