www.avnetwork.com: Last month I offered my thoughts on the current state of audiovisual technology in higher education. It was a brief overview of the technology landscape at colleges and universities, including an analysis of what systems have been the most valuable in the classroom: flipped classrooms and distance learning/lecture capture. Now, to make this a more useful guide for technology managers, I’ll dive into a few products in each category for real-world implementation in higher education.
4 comments:
Maybe it's just me, but these are some of the things I'm always curious about and think about for implementation in different areas. In terms of education environments, CMU is definitely an exception, the majority of the large lecture halls are designed for recording, collaboration, and running a flipped classroom, a prime example being DH A302. Additionally, pretty much everyone of CMU's rooms have a projector and media podium. Granted we have issues and people have such high expectations, but I still find the classroom setups great. Media Tech can even remote into them and look at issues.
I would have to agree with Aamer on this one. I think that CMU is an excellent example of what this article is talking about. I don't think that I've ever been in a classroom that doesn't have a projector with adequate connection opportunities for most of the things that professors hook up to projectors. Also I find CMU's system to be incredibly intuitive. The little touch screen on most of the lecture style classrooms is super easy to navigate and will often times allow the professor to turn on and off the lights right from the podium. Also I have seen on the back of most of these consoles they have room for more inputs and in some of the larger lecture halls they have a wireless mic available for professors to use. Although it almost never works properly.
I spent some time this summer working with the IT department of a local private high school and part of my job was to troubleshoot their classrooms with these built in media systems. As much as I am a fan of the "smart classroom" many of these systems have given little or no thought to UX design. Despite the systems all being the same model, each classroom had a slightly different install. There were buttons in six different places that had to be pushed, and pieces were missing or had been disconnected from many of them. CMU has done a great job with their system, though it still has a ways to go before it is bulletproof. I feel like there is a market for intuitive, versatile, and bulletproof systems of this kind that can be installed anywhere from elementary schools to universities and do the job right.
I would agree that CMU is a great example of a higher learning institution with the necessary equipment to facilitate a professor sharing and teaching using technology, however I was interested in Extron Team Work because I feel like CMU's systems are less geared towards classes where everyone has something to share. Last semester in classes like Foundations of Drama 2, where we all had to share presentations from our separate devices, the changeovers became so time consuming that we all had to put or presentations on our teacher's laptop and share from there. This was hard for people who chose to use different presentation formatting softwares than the other students going that day. I think that CMU should consider methods to make situations like this easier.
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