More than 120 technology managers and directors responded to our questions about prevailing issues that affect the choices we make when planning to bring new learning spaces online. All respondents were directly involved in some aspect of learning space development (i.e. planning, design, procurement, project management, quality control, installation). As evidence of AV-1’s commitment to keeping surveys brief, the majority completed the survey in less than ten minutes.

What follows is our analysis of five key elements explored in the survey.

NUMBER OF ROOMS for each range of per-room equipment costs

The second question asked how many room-projects each of us is involved in this year (2011) as a function of their total equipment value.

I was surprised by the sheer volume of projects. For 2011 survey respondents will be involved in projects that include more than 2500 rooms cumulatively, with greater than $50M in total equipment value. That’s an average of 89 rooms a year. We are clearly part of a very prolific little corner of the audiovisual world.

Our work, however, does skew a bit towards smaller projects. About 60% of the rooms have a total value of $25K or less. Just over a quarter of our room-projects were valued at $10K or less.

Meanwhile, projects over $50K in value will only make up a paltry 16% of our involvement.

I know here at UCLA a high percentage of my projects end up in these lower categories also, doing quite a few incremental upgrades in the typical year. We choose more frequent small upgrade over fewer big upgrades. We find that it helps keep our systems a bit more uniform across campus. The smaller projects are also easier to schedule in between the classes that we typically dodge for all but a few weeks throughout the year.

The high number of small projects, however, raises some questions….

• Do you also reside in this world of incremental upgrades? (At UCLA, we call it “bridge painting.”)
• Are you regularly building out complete, new systems for those smaller dollar amounts?
• Do you use one of the many “packaged” systems out there where many of the core AV system components come pre-kitted and ready to “drop in”?
• Is it possible that the proliferation of these turn-key packages that we’ve seen in the last few years may be facilitating many of these smaller projects?

What PERCENTAGE are these projects of ALL learning space projects at your institution’s location?

With 80% of us being involved in all – or the majority – of classroom technology projects, we are clearly the go-to folks for learning technology at our respective institutions.

How has the QUANTITY of project-rooms that you have been directly involved in (i.e. your project workload) been trending from year to year?

This question revealed a surprising trend: almost 50% of the respondents are seeing our project workload increase, despite many of our budgets getting cut. This is good news certainly, but still perhaps a bit surprising given the state of the economy.
What could be behind this trend?

• Is our workload going up as we are roll out technology to additional, previously untouched spaces?
• Is our refit activity just catching up with us our systems age?
• Are we actually moving work in-house that was previously farmed out to integration firms and consultants?

What do you see as the SINGLE BIGGEST OBSTACLE for increasing your involvement in learning space projects at your institution’s location?

To no one’s surprise, more than 50% of us said that budgetary issues are our biggest obstacle to getting involved in more projects.

While there is no magic formula to bringing in more money or people, would it be beneficial to explore ways to leverage our existing dollars and personnel?  I’m wondering, given the state of the economy and the various budget histrionics many of us have had to endure, if some of us have had to learn some new tricks to eke out the most bang for our limited buck. These were the choices:

1. Budgetary. My department has insufficient resources (funds or personnel) to contribute these in-house services more broadly.
2. Knowledge. Our skill set is insufficient to do the work.
3. Competition. Other in-house service units dominate this market. [no one selected this cause]
4. Political. There are dark forces plotting against us, thwarting our every move.
5. Choice. Why bother when we can farm it out to contractors.
6. The “other” option included some interesting comments….
• “Educating folks on campus that our department can assist them and make the project better than if they try to do it on their own, or trust that it is just going to work right.”
• “Properly managing outsourced suppliers.”
• “Time: Since we don’t do installs every day we are not as fast as the contractors we use.”
• “[Campus] ignorance of what we do.”
• “[None.] We are totally involved.”
• “Unwillingness of administration to see that installed technology requires staff to support it.”
• “Staff preparedness to embrace.”
• “[Lack of] knowledge of contemporary learning space design.”
• “Budgetary but not our budget — those of the different departments we service.”

Chime in now!

Again, thank you for participating in this effort by sharing your thoughtful survey responses. I think that, when a larger number of people participate in AV-1 surveys, we can infer with greater confidence the commonality of experience across our community.  Now it’s your turn, once again: Tell us what you think. Chime in below and on the AV-1 list…

• Do these results reflect what you have experienced?
• Are there additional points that have been overlooked?

Greg Brown, CTS-D
UCLA

This is important stuff. Networked control systems can do much more than just dim the lights and raise the volume, all current systems provide hooks to a database in which every button-push and device-selection is recorded and time-stamped. Furthermore, graphic touch panels offer the added benefit of serving as real-time trouble-shooting tools that can minimize session interruptions and empower users to “fix the glitch” before it turns into everyone’s problem.

Lesson One: Harness your data and make it work for you

No helpdesk operation is immune to the errant user who fires off a hostile tale of woe to the boss in the corner office. Perhaps they woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Or maybe it was just one of those days when, despite best intentions, things go horribly awry. We all have those days.

But from the big boss’s perspective, he imagined that you had everything under control… and now THIS changes everything.

Tiner notes that, while this certainly is a critical time for data (remember that “data” is represented in the “I” of “IT”), the best time for data would have been a year earlier. At that time, free of the taint of grumpy users demanding someone’s head on a stick, the savvy technology director could have begun to brief the administration on the nature of learning technology support.

So, although the help desk fielded 64 trouble tickets in Fall 2010, that represents a failure rate of about 1% when aggregated across 5865 total events… A 99% success rate!

When coupled with trends that show improved service over time, that’s powerful stuff.

Lesson Two: Success is more than finding and fixing the problem, it’s about helping users forget they even had a technical difficulty

The latter opportunity is crucial to successful customer support. At Bates College, an outbound technician must travel across campus to the classroom before taking the time to evaluate the problem and render a solution. Scott’s team implemented a robust library of self-help pages that the user could access right from the touch panel.

Service data indicated that 15% of the time, the instructor had already resolved the problem by the time the technician arrived, nonetheless, the ordeal of poking buttons and rebooting machines left a bad taste in their mouths.

With that, Tiner’s group set the goal of decreasing the amount of time it took to resolve common problems. On closer inspection, the data revealed one of the most common problems was the lack of a laptop video signal (aka the notorious “Fn-F8″ problem). His programmers set to work adjusting the controls to check for a video signal when the “Display Laptop” button was pressed. If the system finds no sync signal, the touch panel displays a self-help prompt for the user to try two easy steps (one of which will usually do the trick) and the on-screen message disappears when system detect video sync.

And the outcomes? Tiner reports that users are engaged in the solution and, consequently, they never perceive that they have a technical difficulty. Instead, the instructor finishes class having a completely positive technical experience. Furthermore, manpower is conserved (30-45 minutes saved per incident) by eliminating the need to dispatch outbound technicians. Bravo!

Scott Tiner is the chairman of InfoCOMM’s Technology Managers Council and a regular contributor on AV-1. Take in Scott’s webinar here (contact info required) and share your thoughts below and on the AV-1 list.

While this is by no means an exhaustive report, we hope that you find these views useful to your due diligence and decision-making.

[Editor's note: Interviews are provided for informational purposes and should not be construed as an endorsement. Neither AV-1, nor the author have received any form of compensation in exchange for these posts.]

This list is shown in last-in-first-out (LIFO) order. In the coming weeks, additional interviews and articles will be posted to the top of this list.

Table of Contents

Mark Valenti, The Sextant Group, discusses the up-side of a down economy as an inspiration for outside-the-box tech planning.

Ernie Bailey, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, speaks about the importance of cross-training to get the best out of AV and IT support staff.

 
Jody Forehand, Luidia, on the cost-effective approach of adding components as-needed.

Jackie Deluna, AMX on the importance of social proof for mission-critical technologies.

John Heffelfinger, Crestron, on the value of end-to-end technology solutions. 

Andrew Edwards, President of Extron, on the zen of simplification and support.

Andrew J. Milne, PhD, Tidebreak CEO, on the meaning and impact of collaborative learning environments. 

Mario Maltese, Audio Visual Resources CEO, on the impact of the AV9000 Standard and the future of zero-defect projects.

What’s your view? Are we seeing the big picture? Leave a reply below or discuss it with fellow AV-1 members on the AV-1 List.

The folks at Luidia built their business around the nifty eBeam whiteboard capture device. Seems oh-so-simple now… stick it to any whiteboard and record your board notes straight to the computer… but when they started out, the general consensus was that you needed a big honking piece of dedicated equipment to get the job done.

While their current market focus is K-12, the eBeam product line offers a lot of value for anyone with a whiteboard and a computer, in other words, pretty much everyone with projects and/or students. In addition to the eBeam, Luidia technology is baked into a variety of products manufactured by 3M, Hitachi, Claridge Products, Chief, edding and Uchida.

How to balance funding constraints with technology needs across multiple installations. Luidia’s Jody Forehand says the company takes a modular approach to solving that problem.

“We’re trying to give schools as much flexibility as possible in how they make their [instructional technology] purchasing decisions,” she says.

In this way, institutions are not locked into having to deploy an expensive, swiss-army-knife solution at all locations. “Just add the components that you need when you need them,” says Forehand. All of this can be accomplished without replacing existing infrastructure.

What’s your view? Are we seeing the big picture? Leave a reply below or discuss it with fellow AV-1 members on the AV-1 List.

Ernie Bailey has played a key role in the development of multimedia learning space at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock. He served as chairman for InfoCOMM’s Technology Managers Council and contributes to other key industry councils.

Medical Schools like UAMS regard learning space as more mission-critical than general college classrooms because lectures are often delivered by clinicians who, unlike traditional faculty, come to class once a year to lecture on their particular specialty. If the technology doesn’t happen to work the day that Dr. Spleen comes in to teach his hepatic clearance module, the content may not be covered. Alternatively, if a student misses that day’s lecture, they may be in big trouble.

“You’re always going to have two support teams,” says Bailey, “one for AV and one for IT.” Understanding the culture and nomenclature differences is crucial to coordinating support across domains. “We use a lot of the same terms (switch, switcher, router, etc.),” he notes, “but they have different meanings.” So it is important to make sure that everyone is speaking the same language.

What’s your view? Are we seeing the big picture? Leave a reply below or discuss it with fellow AV-1 members on the AV-1 List.

16-years ago, Mark Valenti left a good gig in broadcasting to start the AV design firm, The Sextant Group. The idea was simple: bring broadcast-quality precision and production values to the broader market. Twice recognized as one of the best places to work, the firm has made a name for itself in high-profile tech planning and design projects despite being not-the-lowest-price proposal on the table.

Valenti observes that, in light of our new economic realities, technology leaders are “rethinking how they deploy technology and how they deliver education services.”

The bright side is that “there is an opportunity for technology to begin to realize its potential in terms of lowering costs, improving student outcomes, and offering schedule flexibility,” he suggests, “in ways that we have only hinted at in the past 15-years.”

What’s your view? Are we seeing the big picture? Leave a reply below or discuss it with fellow AV-1 members on the AV-1 List.

It’s all about providing “an end-to-end solution at an affordable price.”
-John Heffelfinger

Over the past decade, Crestron has redefined the traditional boundaries between electronics manufacturers. In 2000, the company embarked on an ambitious course, redefining itself from a manufacturer of control systems to an indomitable provider of integrated presentation systems — systems designed to interconnect and automatically communicate with each other.

Some industry insiders regard Crestron’s re-boot to be the tail that wagged the entire AV industry-dog. As evidence, they point to AMX’s (control system manufacturer) subsequent expansion into signal switching and audio distribution, as well as Extron’s (signal interface and switching manufacturer) development of configurable controls and audio components. If this is the case, then Crestron’s greatest contribution may be their rising tide of innovation that lifts all boats.

John Heffelfinger, Regional Manager at Crestron, noted that Crestron’s all-in-one approach is designed to minimize the potential points of system failure. “Think of it as a single point of fix,” said Heff, “with two products, you basically have an entire classroom.”

What’s your view? Are we seeing the big picture? Leave a reply below or discuss it with fellow AV-1 members on the AV-1 List.

It is essential to provide “social proof” for mission-critical technologies.
-Jackie Deluna

The AMX brand is as much about culture as it is about technology. Their big-as-Texas heart is evident in their customer commitment (think of all the organizations that still operate the old Axcess Controller card cages they installed 15-years ago), their sometimes cheeky-yet-endearing marketing approach (remember the “We were just kidding about that Panja thing” campaign?), and their blazing technology firsts (networked controls, asset management software, media server, and especially their advocacy for open standards-based platforms). It’s no wonder they’ve been named one of the top 25 Best Medium-size Companies to Work for in America four years in a row.

So what’s next for these big-hearted Texans? Reaching out to the community is AMX’s strategy. The AMX Educational Alliance is a global program designed to give education institutions direct access to AMX resources. AMX sponsored the New Learning Space Summit at Educomm 2011 (just down the street from InfoCOMM 2011).

Jackie Deluna sees AMX partnerships helping institutions to maximize their current investments in technology by identifying ways to save energy and increase longevity and ROI. Deluna recognizes that we cannot take tech funding for granted. It is essential, says Deluna, for institutions to “provide social proof that that equipment is important.”

Over the past year, AMX has scoured the country to find individuals and institutions changing the face of higher education through innovations in automation, collaboration and new learning space. 16 finalists were recognized at this year’s AMX Innovation Awards.

What’s your view? Are we seeing the big picture? Leave a reply below or discuss it with fellow AV-1 members on the AV-1 List.

Technology in learning would not be what it is today without Extron. When computer manufacturers needed a way to display a computer screen image on a 3-beam projector, Extron worked it out… a quarter of a century ago.

“It’s got to work. It’s got to come out of the box and work.”
-Andrew Edwards

But just “working it out” has never been Extron’s style. In addition to designing cutting-edge components that play well with others, the company has amassed the most comprehensive open library of whitepapers and technical briefs serving to demystify the wild array of protocols and topologies that complicate our lives.

For Andrew Edwards, President of Extron, simplification is crucial. Whether it involves accumulating usage statistics to inform future system considerations, delivering reliable systems that enable analog and digital video to co-exist peacefully, or obtaining training and support, Edwards clearly has technology leaders’ interests in mind.

At Extron’s reception, we caught up with Andrew and asked what he thought we should keep in mind when we get up every morning. In an ah-ha moment that resonated around the table, Edwards suggested that one should not have to worry about the technology every morning.

“We should be putting in things that don’t require that much support,” said Edwards, “and when you do need the support, make sure that you’re with a company that you can get the support from.”

What’s your view? Are we seeing the big picture? Leave a reply below or discuss it with fellow AV-1 members on the AV-1 List.

“You can’t beat the economics of doing things right the first time.”
-Mario Maltese

For more than three decades, Mario Maltese has been at the forefront of high-profile audio visual projects in the New York Tri-state area. A recipient of InfoCOMM’s prestigious Educator of the Year award and Fred Dixon Service in Education award, his portfolio includes sound systems for the New York State Assembly and the New York Stock Exchange’s Trading Floor.

Throughout his career, Maltese often observed that merely providing best-designed system was not sufficient to ensure that the owners’ expectations would be met upon project completion. He found that a myriad of variables beyond the control of a typical AV designer’s scope of work could have a cumulative negative impact on the overall success of a project. Some of these variables include contractor substitutions, vague contract language, lack of communication, spotty in-field verification, and inadequate system performance testing (often a consequence of an integrator neglecting to beta test a proposed systems until the on-site installation).

Through his firm, Audio Visual Resources, Maltese and son, James, have pioneered best practices that enable owners to obtain the high-performance technology solution that they expect. Their findings are outlined in the new proposed ANSI standard, AV9000. This year, Cisco adopted AV9000 as the core of its auditable quality management system on all Cisco TelePresence projects.

See also Association for Quality in AV Technology (AQAV)

What’s your experience with quality control and meeting project expectations? Leave a reply below or discuss it with fellow AV-1 members on the AV-1 List.