Page 72 - spaces4learning, Fall 2024

s p a c e s 4 l e a rn i n g
LEARNING SPACE DESIGN
we’re open to using anything you want to teach with. But be-
cause our support team is so small, it would really not be wise
for us to try to support everything. So we’ve said to our faculty,
“We can provide you with hyper-excellent, gold-standard, glob-
al levels of support on Zoom, because we’re trained, we have a
good back end of support, and we have a very good relationship
with the company. In theory we can do similar with Teams,
because we have a really good relationship with Microsoft. This
is what we can help you with. If you want to use anything else,
be aware that we may not be able to give you the same kind
of internal high-touch support as we would for anything else.”
Right now I’m on a drive to simplify my end-user interface
even more. I’m working with the technical team to see what
things we can remove. The camera display with the zoom in,
zoom out, up, down, left, right, 10 presets—nobody’s using it.
How can we simplify those things going forward? And what
rules can we make to automate other processes? Those things are
where I’ve spent a lot of my time and efforts.
Park: On the immediate horizon, we’re starting to see the use of
AI tools to do the some of that camera tracking pretty effectively.
New technology is expensive when it’s new, but over time as it gets
accepted, the prices come down and it starts to become affordable.
S4L: How do you make sure faculty get
the most out of the technology at their
disposal?
Dechter: Remove buttons from the touch panel—that’s num-
ber one. Why are there so many buttons on that thing? Keep it as
absolutely simple and intuitive as possible. If faculty have four op-
tions, can you get rid of one of them and give them three options?
Go work with people, and if you see them struggling on things,
note when the interface is not clear. I was working in a brand-
new seminar room yesterday, and I could see the department chair
struggling on how to mute and unmute the microphones. The
interface literally said “mute off” and “mute on,” which is kind of
backwards thinking. I don’t want the mute off, I want the micro-
phone on. That’s just some simple UI, changing of labels. Also,
make your buttons on touch panels gigantic. Big buttons that do
simple things are much easier than an array of 27 little buttons.
If you write more than half a page on how to use a system,
you screwed up—go back and redo it. If you have to do docu-
mentation, make it a half page or less, laminate it, and put it
on the lectern, because no one’s going to stand in front of 100
students and read the manual. I’m not a fan of doing these giant
manuals of stuff. I still get them at the end of projects and I
Building Bright Futures
with Comfortable,
Creative Spaces
www.jonti-craft.com | 507-342-5169
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