Emerson College RAs going paperless

This year resident assistants at one Boston college will be given tablets to make their jobs easier.

This will be the first semester with tablets for Emerson College's RAs, according to the school publication, the Berkeley Beacon. The devices will help RAs make their jobs easier and mitigate their use of paper by providing them with a digital means to finish room inventory forms, file incident reports, note missing keys and complete check-ins and check-outs. 

"The main convenience is that we really get to go paperless here because Emerson is trying to work on sustainability," Matt Prince, an RA at the school, told the college newspaper. 

The tablets will help students in charge of the dormitories to streamline their tasks. The schools 58 RAs are distributed across four residence halls. 

Each device comes equipped with a content management system that contains an RA manual as well as a number of useful websites. 

Now that forms previously utilized by the RAs have been replaced with tablets, the school will likely save on printing costs, one of the benefits of going paperless, one expert wrote for the Association for Information and Image Management. Going paperless can save up to up to $500 per person annually. 

In addition, the streamlining benefits of tablets will save time. The efficiency with which RAs can now perform their tasks will give them an opportunity to get more done than they were able to before. 

"The reason [the Office of Housing and Residence Life] told us they were letting us have them until the end of the year is that it is just going to make our job easier and more accessible," Gen Davis, another RA, told the Berkeley Beacon. 

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