Page 27 - Campus Technology, April/May 2017

AV TRENDS
Institutions that haven’t begun making that transition yet can still plan by putting in the infrastructure that can handle the extra traffic, Tomei suggested, whether by building up the standard campus network to support high-definition streaming or by creating a separate network upon which the AV devices run.
2) Go Wireless Everything
This campuswide trend comes to the forefront in AV because wireless AV devices enable more facile collaboration in the classroom. A couple of aspects come into play. First, there are the control elements, such as figuring out how to enable instructors and students to share what they’re looking at on their personal devices on larger classroom displays. After testing about 35 products, Penn State has begun deploying Mersive Solstice, a wireless mirroring and collaboration platform. The university also runs Doceri Desktop, which allows instructors to operate their desktop or laptop from a tablet anywhere in the room, including making annotations on a presentation. “It frees up the instructor from being stuck at the podium or the board lecturing,” Test said. “They can be anywhere there is WiFi, and we have WiFi in all of our classrooms.” When the additions to a presentation are complete, the program allows them to capture images of the changed content to share with students.
Also, there’s the setup of the room to take into consider-
ation. If you can’t get behind the walls or ceiling, wireless is the way to go, said Kurt Shirkey, assistant director of classroom tech support at Salt Lake Community College (UT). The college faced just such problems while setting up a new set of “flex classrooms.” “If you didn’t want cable and wires hanging all over the outside of the room, one solution was to get rid of them and go wireless,” he noted. Those spaces each sport multiple wall-mounted Epson BrightLink wireless projectors. “There’s not a matrix switcher in the room. It’s just a wireless connection to the BrightLinks through a free app you can download,” he said. “You walk in there with a laptop or mobile device and connect into any projector in the room.”
And yes, Shirkey acknowledged, wireless requires “a little more work from the instructors and students because they have to download the app and connect in by typing in the IP address of the technology.” But it’s worked out “pretty well,” he added.
3) Collaboration Needs Are Driving AV Upgrades
The push to connect to, share with and work alongside others, whether in the classroom, across campus or across the world, brings AV collaboration front and center. “There are so many different universities that are sharing content with each other these days,” said Tomei. “You might have a class that’s co-taught by multiple professors at multiple
schools.” So it’s no mystery to him that the “No. 2 most requested feature” he runs into at client sites (behind AV over IP) is web conferencing capabilities.
Previously, schools were likely to invest heavily in videoconferencing technology, “where they had to pay for $20,000 videoconferencing codecs,” he said. Now the solution is mostly software-based, considerably cheaper and plentiful, with offerings such as Zoom, Skype Meetings, BlueJeans and Cisco WebEx, among others. “With those services these clients can get real high-quality web confer- encing that they were previously doing at 10 times the cost with the videoconferencing hardware.”
Similarly, in the past when a college had to use an over- flow room to accommodate extra people for an event, get- ting video and audio from one room to the other “was a little bit of a Herculean task,” said Penn State’s Test. “Now you can buy a thoroughly inexpensive box that will capture all of that as a stream, and then you can send it to the other room via the web or another device.”
Test said that being able to move content so much more freely and at such a lower cost will have a “huge impact” on classroom design and co-teaching. “Penn State has 24 cam- puses, and we’re increasingly offering classes where half the students are on one campus and half are on another campus. The ability to be able to share content in real time between those two physical spaces is really powerful.”4
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | April/May 2017