Webinar: Planning the Future Higher Ed Classroom

Are you designing new learning spaces on your campus? Revamping old ones? In this webinar, join Nureva CEO Nancy Knowlton and other edtech experts as they discuss how to create classrooms that engage students and set your institution apart. You’ll get concrete tips on how to combat faculty resistance and looming budget challenges, plus you’ll find out about latest trends and tech products that are poised to transform higher education.

Time stamps

6:12 — Biggest trends in edtech

10:12 — How students help you see what’s next

15:18 — Pain points and how to overcome them

19:56 — How to get faculty on board with new tech

27:32 — Why audio matters

33:21 — The rise of HyFlex learning

36:37 — The new world of USB-C

39:38 — How to design for flexibility

48:08 — Tech beyond the classroom

Webinar transcription

Cindy Davis: Hi there, my name’s Cindy Davis. I’m the content director for AV Technology, and I’m thrilled to be hosting this webinar today — Planning the Future Higher Ed Classroom: Attract Students & Increase Enrollment. Next I’d like to thank our sponsors, Atlona and Nureva, because without them we're not going to be able to present such great content. Next, I want to bring our panelists to the stage. Daniel, come to the stage, accept the invite. Nancy, Katie and Craig. Now that we’re all here, I’m going to ask each one of you to introduce yourselves. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your company as it relates to today’s discussion. If you’d start off, Craig, that would be wonderful.

Craig Park: Thanks, Cindy. Hi, I’m Craig Park. I’ve worked in the AV industry for over 40 years in design, consulting, integration and manufacturing. Today, I serve as the associate principal and director of digital experience design for Clark & Enersen architects and engineers, based in Lincoln, Nebraska. Though I get to live in Charleston, South Carolina. We are a national AE practice specializing in the design of education and academic research facilities. For the last 15 years, I’ve focused on designing education facilities. I’m active in AVIXA on the technology side, and on the client side I’m active in SCUP, the Society for College and University Planning, and APPA, the educational facilities management association. At APPA, I’m the editor and contributor to the APPA Facilities Manager magazine’s technology and trends column, and I serve on the editorial advisory board for Spaces4Learning magazine. And I host a new podcast, EdUp Smart Space, part of The EdUp Experience network that looks at the intersection of education, technology and architecture. Thanks for having me on the show.

Cindy: Great. Thanks, Craig. Nancy.

Nancy Knowlton: Hi, I’m Nancy Knowlton. I’m the president and CEO of Nureva. I started out my career as a university instructor, actually for 4 years, teaching computer science and accounting. I moved on from that and along with my husband started a company called SMART Technologies. So, my husband’s the inventor of the SMART Board®. And we put a lot of SMART Boards into K–12 classrooms as well as higher education.

About 10 years ago, we started Nureva, and we decided to create audio products for large and extra-large spaces, the most complex of audio challenges out there. We took a completely different approach to audio than beamforming and created multi-patented technology called Microphone Mist™ technology. Our prototype customer when we created that product was the IT manager. So, we’re very focused on ease of installation, ease of setup, ease of deployment, ease of management and ease of upgrade.

Cindy: Katie.

Katie Babula: Hi everyone. My name’s Katie Babula. I’m the manager of audiovisual technologies here at the University of Rhode Island, so I head up a powerful but small little five-person team. And we are what is that growing classification of in-house installers for our institution. So, we’re the first call for our faculty when they’re in the classroom. We also will design, procure and install our new AV systems for our campus. And then we also do live event support as well. So, we kind of cover the full gamut and that also obviously includes future decision-making, planning and all of the associated fun that is procurement nowadays.

Cindy: Great. Thanks, Katie. Daniel.

Daniel Williams: Hi, my name is Daniel Williams. I’m the technical specialist and trainer for Atlona for the eastern half of the United States. I provide training of our technology solutions and we’re doing this on the road throughout the United States right now. So, look for the next training coming near you. Atlona is a manufacturer of AV technology solutions that can help you make your classroom systems work better and simpler. We provide simple extension solutions, AV switching solutions and we’re focusing a lot more and more on USB-C connectivity as it’s become more and more important to what we’re doing today.

Cindy: We’ll be talking about that coming up — big, big topic. So, this month, and gosh, it’s been all over the news, high school seniors are getting acceptance or rejection letters in the mail. We probably all have a few that we know. Many colleges are boasting very low acceptance rates because 2025 marks the peak of high school graduates. Now, we’ve all heard of the enrollment cliff, not sure if it’s exactly a cliff, but over the next 15 years that number is going to decline precipitously of high school graduates. Planning for the near future and 15 years out and beyond, today, is absolutely critical.

As much as I’d like to stop talking about the pandemic, I’m really happy to say that we’re 5 years out. But some classrooms are still outfitted with the ad hoc equipment that was cobbled together 5 years ago. And fortunately, 5 years is right around that technology refresh. So, now is the time to plan for technologies that will set your college or university apart from the rest to, importantly, recruit new students and certainly keep your current students engaged and increase enrollment from afar in the future.

So, let’s get to it. First, I’d like to ask each of you some of the biggest trends you’re seeing in classroom technologies with your customers, clients and, of course, Katie, at URI. Craig, if you’d start off from your perspective and then everybody join in. What are you seeing as some of the biggest trends?

Biggest trends in edtech

Craig: Well, you know, it’s funny because the biggest trends are trends that have been constant throughout my career. We used to say that there are three important parts to designing for technology — it’s infrastructure, infrastructure and infrastructure. And that remains true today.

But today, we’re really leveraging a really robust IT infrastructure, both optical fiber and category copper cabling, to incorporate AV over IP ecosystems that allow, especially using the new IPMX standard, which is just becoming recognized as the model for AV system management for all the AV devices connected across the entire campus. Simplifies management and reduces cost. It allows for the control of everything from DB LED screens, if we’re talking about the product-side advancements, smart DSP like Nancy mentioned for audio pickup and reproduction and really focused on an improved user interface. We look a lot at both GUI design and just how folks interact with technology.

A lot of our work is in technical trade — that’s a new rising kind of building type for that level — as well as simulation learning in medicine and related fields that use extended reality, augmented virtual reality tools. We’re seeing an interest in growth in gigabit optical networks, so replacing category copper with fiber. Where you are now limited to a 300-foot distance limitation with copper, optical fiber will run for 8 miles at a higher bandwidth and higher security. And there’s a focus on unified communication so that we can see all of our voice and video and data systems work together.

Cindy: Interesting. Nancy, if you would.

Nancy: The trends that we’re seeing really fall into three categories.

The first is, instead of doing, you know, a few select rooms every year, the institutions that we’re talking to are looking at broad-based deployment. So, every classroom.

And increasingly, we’re talking to customers who want to get dual usage from their rooms — so, classroom and meeting room — and they want to be able to reconfigure those spaces dynamically from hour to hour or use to use.

And the third area, really, is the integration of audio and video systems, such that the camera views within the classroom are controlled by audio location data.

Cindy: Interesting. Daniel.

Daniel: I’ll be able to speak for a moment. I’m in a hotel at the moment. They just did a test of a system. Hopefully, it won’t be an actual alarm. But Craig kind of covered most of what is out there. Certainly, the AV over IP is a big thing that we’re seeing as a trend. And then as I mentioned earlier, USB-C connectivity. More and more laptop computers today are coming with that USB-C connectivity on them and going away from other types of technologies. So, one of the biggest trends we’re seeing is simply having to change technology to be able to adapt to the changing needs of the presentation technology that end users are having to work with.

Cindy: Of course, we had a conversation before we all got together today, and Katie, you mentioned an interesting thing that’s not necessarily a trend, but how universities should really start to recognize some trends. And you mentioned talking to [unintelligible]. If you could expand on that a little bit because I thought that was really interesting … admissions. rather.

How students help you see what’s next

Katie: So, it’s something that’s, for our team, we think, one of the best benefits we have is we’re really connected to all of our groups on campus. Part of it comes just by the accidental nature of working events on campus. You see everybody. But one of the things that can happen, especially when you’re looking at enrollment, attracting students, is both getting feedback from them but also being a resource to them.

One of the things that’s always stuck with me was, early in my career, I was talking at a welcome day, as we call them here, for our admitted students. We want them to confirm. We want them to convert, to be freshmen in the fall. And an admissions officer was complaining to me that they kept getting feedback on their forms that the prospective students were like, “Your presentation’s old. It looks old.” And she was like, “We redid all the photos, they’re all new, the music’s fresh.” She goes, “Katie, what are they talking about?” I’m like, “You’re in 4:3.” And she was like, “What are you talking about?” I’m like, “The students view square, tube TV as we would think of it, as something that’s old. They want to see your presentation go to wide screen.” And it was something where, that it was outside their realm of awareness and it was a disconnect that they had with understanding the perception of their prospective students. Their students were looking at it as going, “This institution looks old. They’re showing us this old format of video, this old image format.” And so, they took it to heart and they started really dialing in.

And now we have a really engaged admissions office. They’re really big on making it exciting to come to our welcome days. They’re starting to do some really innovative things across campus. Just last night, we had Live from CHS. So, one of our colleges did a live mini lecture from an auditorium where we do hybrid courses anyway. And it was a Zoom, and it was meant to, you know, get prospective students a peek at what their college experience could feel like. And so, it’s kind of pushing that bar, working with them and facilitating and setting up the environment that’s helping these groups, but also knowing that outside of our own peers, outside of our faculty, we have other offices and institutions on our campus that can help give you that guidance and that feedback of what matters.

Cindy: Really interesting. You know, how about trends, what do you hear from students, incoming students? You know, what they’re looking for? Do you get to that level?

Katie: I do have an office of about 20 students that report directly to us. And so, sometimes, it’s different. Some of them will roll their eyes when they’re like, “Why is this lecture not on LMS? Why are they gatekeeping it? I don’t understand. This is taking time.”

Some of them, a lot of them, really do like lecture watch back, whether it be they didn’t understand it the first time they saw the lecture … They want to be able to play it back for themselves and kind of rewatch sections and things like that.

Other things, it’s the social side of campus, right? So, things like students getting really excited for esports. Video gaming is one of the biggest kinds of backgrounds and trends that students do. It’s one of the most popular social things they do. And it’s not something that they now expect, rather, that they have it a lot in high schools and they’re expecting it in some capacity. It doesn’t need to be an esports arena. Ours is just an esports club that’s getting started up. But it’s a point of student engagement. So, those are some of the trends we’re seeing.

Students really like the flexibility and things like that to be able to go hybrid in bad weather. In New England, they expect if not school canceled, go hybrid. But sometimes we know with faculty and rural schooling that’s not always available. But they’re far more prepared and expecting of technical flips, we’ll say, or adjustments.

Cindy: That’s great. I certainly would have loved that when I was in school, as well. Josh, if you would, open up the first poll question. We’re going to talk about some pain points.

So, poll question — this is just for the higher ed folks. Anybody else joining, just take a look. Poll question is: What are your biggest pain points? And I’m giving you a list of pain points that I’ve polled other folks. I know there’s a ton more, but it’s multiple choice. So, go ahead and click off the ones that you find is your biggest pain points and we’ll get to talk about those.

Katie, let me start with you. Pain points — what are some of the biggest ones that you’re having? And I know we were just talking and we’re dealing with budget cuts. How are you doing with that?

Pain points and how to overcome them

Katie: Yeah, budgets are always interesting as we’re a small state institution, we’re tuition driven. So, we always have a little budget that we’re dealing with relative to the size and scope of our institution. And so, we were talking before this about budget cuts that we’re already feeling, the federal impact at our school. A lot of it’s preventative, some of it’s kind of preplanning.

Even just this past month, we had to deal with taking our planned renovations down to a kind of a modest view. And we prepare for that, right? So, what we do as our team — we have a little bit of benefit of being an in-house installer, it makes us very flexible. But they’re not elements that can’t be applied to other institutions.

Some of the things we do is, we think in terms of what can be a commonsense phase, right? Do we have to do all the technologies in this refresh at once? Can we flip and say, OK, all the rooms are working, but what’s going to make this experience overall better that we can purchase into now that will last through to the next time we get funding? Projectors are usually a big one, things like that. We have classroom computers for our instructors to use, so targeting those. And a lot of it that goes hand in hand with that.

And also fighting for the budget. A lot of my job is justifying and fighting for our dollars, making sure I’m using metrics and using numbers that I can adequately take up to my administration the understanding of why this matters. They don’t always understand this concept of, well, the room is old and it’s causing pain. They’re like, “So! I have other things to buy.” But they listen a lot more when I say, “Hey, this auditorium is going to cost me $15,000 to do a small fix or update and it’s going to impact 600 students and affect 2,400 student hours.” Suddenly, they’re all looking at you going, “Oh, that’s a lot of hours of the week that students are going to be impacted and affected by this change.”

And it’s a dialogue and a metric we use consistently at our institution. We call them student contact hours — so, how many course hours, how many students in a course and how many course credits is that course? How many hours a week do you have students in that space? And that helps drive it and it gives you a metric to take to administration, because that’s what they want. They want to see impact hours against budget dollars. And when you get yourself in that habit of framing your conversation, you can really start kind of pulling them your way and getting them to see why your investment matters to their institution. So, that’s kind of how we tend to tackle it.

Cindy: Interesting. I think everybody can see the results of the poll. We’ll close the poll now, but I want to keep it up for a moment to talk about it. Not surprised, actually. Tighter budgets is not the top one, which is a bit of a surprise. Resistance from instructors to embrace new technologies is the top one, and we’ve heard that for years. But, unfortunately, it’s still the top. We definitely want to talk about that. And getting the proper decision-makers at the table to agree on technologies, that’s interesting to see that that’s pretty high up there on the list as well.

Let’s talk about some of these. Daniel, you had mentioned earlier, in one of our earlier discussions — these decision-makers, who are they? And who should they be? So, actually anybody can join in on that if you would.

Craig: I would say we have to recognize that when an architect starts working with a client, a university or college, for a new building, they won’t see that new building for at least 3 years, between the design process which takes 9–12 months to the build process that takes 24 to sometimes 36 months, depending on the scale of the project. To address that original pain point of budget is when we have to be sort of Carnac and project what’s that budget going to look like in 3 years, based on today’s dollars. And we have to anticipate, or to the extent we can — we can never anticipate COVID or tariffs — they wouldn’t have been on our list of things to consider until they’re an immediate concern. So, we try and build enough contingency into the budget to allow for that to happen.

How to get faculty on board with new tech

Craig: I want to speak quickly about the resistance of instructors to embrace new technologies. We’re at this transition point. I think it was the summer of 2019, the demographics in the United States shifted from where we had more people under 40 than over 40, in the summer of 2019. Which means we have a younger cohort as now the majority. But the older cohort tends to be the tenured faculty. And tenured faculty as native analogs, as they’re referred to. People that grew up with analog technology as the basis of their learning and their practice were not technology-rich spaces the way that those now digital native students — the late millennials and Z and now alpha generations — expect. We have this disconnect in the discourse of how rooms should be used and classes should be taught. So, those are the challenges that need to be discussed during those programming, early discussions about how a building is going to function. The more voices we can bring to the table, the better that conversation is as a result.

Cindy: On that resistance of instructors to embrace new technologies, the UI’s everything, making it easy for instructors to literally walk in a room and start engaging and teaching. And there’s a lot of ways of doing that. Daniel and Nancy, I know we’ve talked about this before. Nancy, I know you’re shaking your head.

Nancy: I had a great expression of what exactly the problem is and how I should think about it from the man who’s leading a distance education program. He said, “You know, instructors only have 5 percent of their brain available to operate technology during a class. They are focused on their materials. So, whatever you do, it has to be intuitive and easy for them.” So, in creating solutions, that has to be the prime driver. I’ve seen a good level of technology adoption. It’s being led by instructional coaches, people who are working with the instructors. They can go without fear of being embarrassed because they don’t know some of the technologies. And they can experiment. I’ve seen, as well, universities that set up classrooms so that instructors can experience them in advance of a broader deployment. So, many different strategies to get instructors comfortable and to break through that barrier.

Daniel: Nancy, I just want to add that, fortunately, the systems themselves today have gotten simpler. I think if we had done this poll 5 to 10 years ago, that percentage of things where the technology was or the resistance from instructors to the new technology would have been even larger than what the percentage of the poll is today. And, I think, if we can keep that in mind and just embrace the simpleness of everything, and everything you’ve just said about making the user interface simple. There are solutions on the market that can make the functionality of the system plug and play. All you have to do is a little bit of thought in advance. Even the simplest of solutions, where it’s nothing more than a computer to a display, can be simply plug and play.

Craig: I’m waiting for the day of conversational control where [Amazon] Alexa will run my room for me.

Cindy: Don’t say that. Mine just turned on.

Craig: Yeah, that happened the last time I did that.

Daniel: That’s actually been tried, and the issue isn’t so much the AI technology, it’s the backend network technology is consumer oriented, and these schools don’t want to put consumer-oriented (and rightly so, security reasons) don’t want schools to put consumer-oriented products in their space.

Craig: But something, you know, something Nancy said, and I think, we advocate and I’ve seen a number of colleges and universities start to plan on — I’m curious if Katie has this — are building sandbox spaces where they are, in fact, sort of a test-based classroom where both faculty and students can come in and experiment with new technology configurations. I had a friend recently talk about almost like a small black box theater where it’s easy to pull tech in and out, rich infrastructure for it. And it gave an experimental place to do. And I know a number of universities have implemented that. Katie, do you have that?

Katie: I wish I did. We used to have an instructional kind of classroom that was meant to be a trainer space. But we’re very tight, like many institutions are, on our footprint. So, we have a ton of limit and competing interest for good space on campus, right? We’re an older institution — we originated in 1886 or something like that. And we had a big boon of buildings in the 50s and 60s, which aren’t really conducive to new technologies or new networks and things like that. So, it’s one of those where we have a very small footprint. We don’t actually have a lot of space to try to get our instructors ahead of time into it without a lot of forethought and planning. That’s where we really try to target … that is, training week on our campus.

Over the past 10 years, I’ve trained my faculty. They know 2 weeks before classes start, they are getting their email of when their group trainings are happening, when they can schedule their trainings and things like that. And we’re really trying to kind of build into it because a lot of our faculty are on contract. We know they won’t be around in the summer sometimes to sandbox this. They have a contract, they will show up and start work when the contract starts. So, we try to really target all of our engagement without overwhelming them around that kind of contract time and trying to be available for them and things like that.

But yeah, I would really love a sandbox space, even just for ourselves, to be able to spin up new spaces and proof-of-concept testing. Right now, it’s my programmer designer’s office, which looks like the back of the Batcave. And there’s wires and boxes and things. That’s how we do it currently on a small scale. But yeah, we would adore to have a nice little black box. I don’t think Theater will give us their nice little black box theater. They like it too much.

Craig: I’m working with a small university now up in North Dakota. They had run into the same issue — small campus. So, they’re building what they’re calling the theory classroom. And it’ll be a general-use classroom, but it’s outfitted to change on a regular basis.

Cindy: That’s an interesting concept. So, one of the pain points I hadn’t listed is audio. It’s been a pain point forever, but fortunately in the last few years it has been apparent there’s a reason it’s a pain point — it’s because it’s been on the back burner. But there are so many new great technologies that really help with intelligibility. Nancy, I’ve got to kick this one to you. How has it changed? What’s available? What are some of the use cases?

Why audio matters

Nancy: I love this word intelligibility because that was the key design consideration for us from a user’s perspective. And that really got reinforced for us when we spoke to one of our customers that always did translation. And he told us something that is equally applicable to higher education, as well. He said that when a translator is listening, they must understand that very first word because, if they don’t, often the rest of the sentence doesn’t make any sense.

And if you’re talking about remote students, student engagement, they will tune out if they’ve got to go to an extra level to capture what is being said. Because listening is hard. At a distance, you’re not in the mix, you’re missing some of the visual cues in the room no matter how good your video is. It really needs a strong fixation there.

When I say that we took a different approach to technology, I’m not trying to pooh-pooh beamforming, because I think it’s got a lot of great uses cases. And it’s been the workhorse technology for a long time. We came at audio from a different perspective.

I mentioned that my husband and I had started SMART Technologies, before. We had a 25-year experience there. So, we had this concept that people didn’t sit at the same location all the time. We expected collaboration to be active, to be messy, where people sat, they stood, they walked around. So, we came with a different mindset. I think mapping the use case to the various technologies that are deployed is absolutely critical and no more so than with audio.

Daniel: Nancy, one of the biggest things I’ve seen is the changes in the past, say 5 or 10 years ago, you could almost say it was virtually impossible to get the students’ audio, to capture the voices of the students in the room. Or if it was possible, it was incredibly difficult and expensive and very technical to set up.

The technology has changed to where it’s almost easy to pick up the students in the classroom. It was always easy to get the instructor — you give them a microphone, they talk into the microphone, that’s easy. But getting the students was always very challenging. And it’s much easier now.

Craig: However, I will say on the design practitioner side, we can’t ignore acoustics as a contributor to good quality audio. For all the architects in the audience, I want to say don’t stop hiring acousticians because that’s really critical to the performance of these new advanced DSP-based audio systems. As good as they are, you can’t put them in a glass box and expect it to sound good.

Katie: Yeah, we’re fighting fan noise acoustically in our institution everywhere, and it’s a repeated faculty issue. It’s one where we have a lot of spaces that, because of COVID, because of response to get better airflow and circulation, adding HVAC to old buildings and things like that, we started getting a lot of fan hum. Part of it was depending on how it was deployed — it to be quick to respond to needs that was more of our facilities team doing it, and I’m not quite sure if all of our architect team was fully involved in it. We do have campus architects.

You don’t know where it comes from, but once it’s there, resolving it now becomes a whole other issue. Some spaces you just have to blast through it, you have to try to just overpower it as much as you can. And we love to look for things where there are ways to gate it out. Can we use sound to cancel sound out? What can we do to augment the space to make this a better environment? Because that kind of noise is also very mentally taxing on the brain for students and makes it really hard to focus in the classrooms.

Nancy: There’s a couple of ways of thinking about that. Because of our IT-first approach in product design, we think about how do we suppress consistent noises like HVAC and just not let that go through. And, increasingly, the applications themselves, the UC&C applications, are blocking those background noises as well. So, I hope that that becomes a problem of the past.

Cindy: And it sounds like when we were talking about the classroom of the future, increasing enrollment from afar, that’s going to be absolutely critical because if you really want that student engagement from students. And, actually, even today, Katie, you were talking about earlier how you’re in the Northeast, if there’s a snowstorm, you want to be able to still be connected to the classroom and engage. You’ve got to be able to hear the students in the classroom from remote locations, whether it’s in the next dorm room or around the world.

The rise of HyFlex learning

Craig: Right. It’s certainly going to extend the potential for the campus to attract students to their programs. And we saw certainly a lot of schools implemented various forms of Zoom and Teams and other platform connectivity.

Now we’re seeing what’s termed hybrid HyFlex, which really we try and achieve digital equity so that the remote student sees all the other students in the classroom as well as the faculty and the material. So that means more screens. More internal network. More importance of confidence monitors for the faculty to be able to see what’s being presented either by themselves or by the remote participants. More interactivity. All of that adds to a much more technology-rich space.

Katie: Yeah, we’re seeing a lot at our institution. Faculty aren’t fighting that students are bringing laptops to the classroom. They know it’s happening, it’s how they’re doing notes. So, we’re starting to see this shift in our spaces, and it immediately applies to our network infrastructure as well but also as we evaluate tools, we see a lot more computer-based testing. So, we see a lot more in-classroom, utilize your own, testing their platform at lockdown for the test or things like that.

But then, we’re also seeing them trying to engage students more. A lot of it started with kind of your hybrid, your online collaborative documents like your Google Docs™ [web-based program] and things like that. But we’re starting to see a little bit more of that bleed in because there’s a big push with faculty of how do I keep this generation engaged? Their notoriously short attention span, they’re kind of set up and driven to it, so there’s this new game developing in faculty of “how do I want to adapt my teaching style to be in this acceptable format?” But also, “how do I keep them engaged?”

We know it’s hard as instructors, presenters, to present to dead faces when they’re just kind of glazed over and staring at you, waiting for you to be done. You’re like, “Please give me something to work with. I’m trying to make this good for both of us.” And so, that’s something we’re seeing. Sometimes it’s engaging, like you said, in our larger auditoriums. How can you break into small groups? How are you designing auditoriums to be small-group friendly, to be able to do this for you?

Craig: I’m never designing an auditorium again!

Katie: No, you’re not. Like, I’ve seen a lot of really cool tiered almost platform-style ones. Or in the round spaces. Those get really cool. Obviously, active learning has been a big buzzword and favorite thing, but we also get faculty who don’t actually know what that means when they’re in a room that could do active learning. That’s where either you have a teaching assistants’ office, where they help instructors, telling them how to switch their pedagogy to match it would be great. But sometimes, faculty don’t have time for that, or they don’t want to work with that office for whatever reason. It’s the reality.

Cindy: So, I want to give Daniel a chance. Early on, when we were introducing ourselves, we talked about USB-C, which is a hot point. And just connectivity overall. It’s always an issue, and USB-C is definitely a hot point. So, Daniel, take it away on that.

The new world of USB-C

Daniel: What I think is one of the most important things, is that people need to educate themselves on what USB-C really is. It’s a term that’s thrown out there. It’s showing up everywhere. But it is so many things, or it can be nothing. Or not nothing, but it can be very little. You know, we think of it as a simple thing for a phone charger, but it can do more than that. But it doesn’t mean that the device you have can do more than the phone charger can do.

It really comes down to, we all in the industry have to educate ourselves about what USB-C is and what it can and can’t do and how to work with it so that we can then start implementing it so that when it gets to the point where an instructor is plugging a cable into their computer, it works because we’ve done the research ahead of time to be able to educate ourselves on what, how it works.

The other thing we still need to remember though is, thinking back to that comment about the resistance to new technology by some of the instructors, we have to remember that. So, we can’t just take the all-or-nothing approach and say well, everything is going USB-C so I’m going to drop all the old technology. Unfortunately, you still have to build on that technology and keep some of the older stuff. That means HDMI still has to stay around for a little while. But add into a system that USB-C.

And there are plenty of solutions on the market and ways to give the connectivity both that HDMI, that classic what we’re used to, and add the USB-C onto it because they’re very complementary to each other. And there’s tons of solutions on the market, there’s more solutions coming out every day.

One of the biggest challenges for the last say, 18 months, 24 months, was extending USB, especially from cameras, and having it go longer distances. And it is just now within the last say 6 to 9 months that we as manufacturers have the core technologies that are allowing us to be able to produce products that can extend that technology. So, if 9 months ago you said, “I can’t find a single thing that can allow me to extend USB-C,” look again. Start looking again. Start talking to different manufacturers in the industry and you’re going to see there’s more of it out there. You’re going to see more things.

Cindy: Josh, I’d like to ask you to open up the next poll. And I’m going to leave that up for a while. I’m kind of curious as to what technologies … what classroom technologies do you plan on installing or upgrading in your classroom in the next 3 to 12 months? I won’t ask you further out than that.

So, interactivity, the active classroom, everybody wants an active classroom. I don’t care what you want to call it. It’s about engagement. What are some of the technologies? How are displays being used now? Are displays evolving? The collaboration. Talk about that a little bit. Craig, what are you seeing?

How to design for flexibility

Craig: Well, it’s interesting with Nancy in the room and the discussion of SMART Boards. I’m a big fan of interactive boards, of screens, as a tool to complement the always-demand for whiteboards or more whiteboards. There’s something flexible in the way a whiteboard works that a certain type of faculty is attracted to and a certain student cohort as well. It gives you a way to create sort of interactive, nondidactic components that lets people engage that way.

But, more and more, we’re seeing that it’s a function of flexibility, of being able to reconfigure spaces for different kinds of activities, that allows the classroom to be really, truly flexible. So, that’s a combination of furniture and technology in a way that anticipates change.

It’s why I made that sort of snarky comment about no more auditoriums. I would rather see a lot of flat-floor spaces that could be reconfigured. It’s much easier to change in the future.

And in talking to clients in the past, talking to a technology director in a business school in California that I designed in 1995, and he was doing a new extension of that building in 2010. And I asked him what he would do differently. He said, “I would have taken out all those sloped-floor auditoriums and made them flat floor so we could do different things with them over time.” The biggest change, and somebody asked this question in the Q&A piece, is providing flexible infrastructure. That’s more power, more data points, more Wi-Fi® [wireless networks].

I was going to talk about not only to Daniel’s point about USB-C, but increasing demand of Wi-Fi means a much denser Wi-Fi environment in the whole building. Because each of us are walking now around with … I have a watch, a phone, a ring. Now I have a smart ring. The multiples of user devices has just increased exponentially.

Nancy: You know, one of the most interesting spaces that I’ve seen is a classroom, flat floor, with a space that had seven interactive displays. So, this would have been maybe one of your dream spaces, Craig. There was a whole class and then they broke down into groups where each of the groups could work at their own separate display. And the ease with which that happened was really amazing. Really, no class time lost on the technology. So, I think it will happen.

Craig: Yeah. And then there is continuing interest in active learning configurations where you’ve got setups for cohorts of four to six students. They’re watching the lecture the night before and they’re then coming to class and work in small groups on problems and then present their solutions to the whole class, as a way to not only express what they’ve learned, but also master communication skills.

I worked on a project for UT Southwestern in Dallas that has 42 teams of six in one room. That replaced a 250-seat sloped-floor auditorium. And the faculty have said it’s become the model for the way they want to teach in all their classes on campus. I think that’s the future.

Katie: What I found interesting in active learning … we deployed our first active learning classroom back in roughly 2013-ish. And we saw mixed adoption. We saw some instructors feel a little bit intimidated by having every class in the active learning classroom for a whole semester. We did a bit of live feedback. Some felt a little bit restrained. They all panicked at that time of that testing.

And what we saw develop on our campus was this really interesting approach by scheduling. And it was a little bit instructor driven because you would have two sections of the same course or two courses within the same … scheduled at the same time in the same department. And they scheduled themselves to flip spaces. So, they would use the active learning space as a lab, a little bit to what Craig was saying. Every instructor knew that every week, they would have dedicated time in a front-facing didactic to do their quizzing, to do their information sharing. But then they also knew that they had the flexibility for engagement in that kind of more active learning space. And that was what took that active learning space from being used by the smaller section of instructors to being more consistently booked for us.

So, it’s a good stepping stone for institutions who may have active spaces, administrations pushing it, when you don’t have instructors ready for it. How can you find that middle ground? And again, partners on campus, working with your scheduling office to recontextualize how do classes look on this campus? And it can even be as easy as two courses agreeing, hey, we’re just going to swap on Thursday. And it creates a proof of concept and gets you rolling out and lets you wade into that new technology.

Cindy: So, we’ve got a lot of questions in here. Craig, can you expand a bit on the theory classroom, and how is the future considered when designing for an uncertain industry?

Craig: Well, in that particular instance, it’s in a health education building, but it’s a building close enough to the rest of campus to be used for other applications. Much to Katie’s point, they’re going to look at this as a scheduling opportunity to create a room that has both the ability to teach didactically but it also has multiple screens on the front — what I call the teaching wall. It has confidence monitors for the instructor at the back. It has six perimeter monitors for cohorts of six when they rearrange the furniture. It has a denser Wi-Fi than the rest of the building. And it is USB-C centric. We’re trying to do everything we can.

The good news is that the driving force behind this project is the vice president of academic affairs and the CIO on campus. So, they’re our clients. So, it’s really interesting to hear both from the teaching side, from the vice president of academic affairs as well as the CIO’s model, because he’s monitoring much like Katie described, how all their classrooms are being used. And he’s constantly tweaking all of his classroom designs so they continue to evolve on a regular basis.

Someone asked that question, what could you do? I think an open grid ceiling that will allow you to hang devices or suspend devices to bring in additional lighting or additional cameras. All of those things just make the room more flexible.

I mentioned that UT Southwestern project. It’s on a 3-inch raised floor to allow the underfloor cabling to change at a whim. It doesn’t change as often as they thought it might, but it’s there if they want to.

Cindy: Interesting. So, leave the results of the poll up, Josh, if you would. Projectors are not going anywhere, and certainly not in higher education. It’s interesting to see projectors are at the top of the list of what’s going to be installed. USB-C connectivity is right up there. And, actually, just about everything is fairly equal, lots of technologies being installed.

So, let me put it back out to the panel. You know, if we’re thinking about attracting students. If the students and parents come to the campus, they’re looking to see, do you have a modern campus? Are your classrooms set up that way, and also public spaces? We haven’t even talked about other spaces.

Tech beyond the classroom

Craig: Student life. Libraries or learning commons. They’re almost as important as the classrooms themselves in terms of student engagement. The residence halls, in particular, we’re now incorporating more group study spaces in there that allow them to work on team projects away from the classroom spaces.

Cindy: So, what are the technologies that should be on the list of ensuring that your college or university is future forward? Anybody can take that.

Katie: For any institution, especially when it comes to the competition, projections and large displays, start doing your cost analysis. We’re starting to find that for return on investment, life of long scale, we’re starting to reach the avenue where the LED panels are coming down to pricing and price points, where that’s what we’re going to start targeting our large auditoriums.

You think about student welcome days, your first 1- or 2-year students, your risk of transfer, they come into their BIO 100 and they get this really awesome video wall that gives them a better view of the content that looks really great. If you’re looking for secondary revenue sources, conferencing and things like that, when you bring in conferences to your campus, if that’s something your institution does, your video wall can come in and start giving you a better investment at that bigger scale.

So, that’s where we’re starting to kind of hedge into. We’re starting to figure out, OK, where can these go? They’re modular. A lot of them can hot swap. So, if one panel gets dinged, dies out, you can get a ladder and swap it out. And it’s something where I think it scares institutions. You think it’s going to be this big, big budget item. But there’s now a lot of players in the market and not all of them are coming from China, which is great. There are some that are coming out of European-based models. So, you may not have that initial tariff scare coming at you. So, it’s one of those to keep an open mind on. Don’t be afraid of considering it.

Find local vendors and things like that. You also have a variety of pixel depths and spaces, and I think that’s something that’s not fully in everyone’s awareness quite yet. But I would recommend to really consider, since it will start positioning you almost like a feature that can be really flexible for you as well.

Craig: I agree. We’re seeing more and more of that in both class spaces as well as in common spaces. I worked on a project at the University of Nebraska Omaha where there’s a 30-foot DB-LED wall that is in a building that serves for academic research, but the DB-LED wall is managed by the communication school as a project. So, students are actually working on the content that’s shown in there as the people come through the lobby and so, very visitor-centric building.

Katie: Our next one is going in our food court. So, our food court since COVID has kind of become this campus living room, I’ll call it. Students hang out there to do their homework in between classes. It’s central to campus. It’s within our Memorial Union. It’s big, there’s food there. They have dining plans. And we see a lot of events there. Bingo night is taking off — I didn’t think I’d see a lot of bingo nights now, but they like bingo on our campus. Bingo is coming back! And things like that, but also sometimes film showings. They’ll do a film showing and a movie and things like that, overflow for football games. Oddly enough, I never would have pegged it pre-COVID that our food court is starting to become a student activity hub where we’re seeing student engagements happen by student groups with a lot of student-led engagement happening there.

Craig: And you mentioned earlier esports and I think that’s another big growing trend on campuses, either converting older facilities to become an esport arena or providing spaces for that in student unions or the learning commons. Places that generally attract a larger cohort of students from different departments.

Cindy: Nancy, we were talking earlier before we came on and you were mentioning technologies to really increase that enrollment for the declining student base. Talk about that for a little bit.

Nancy: You know, I think about technology opening up the enrollment base to the world when students no longer have to be physically present. Look at all of the barriers, right? There’s questions about student visas and things of that nature. It’s a great level of uncertainty. It may deter some students. But if you can reach out and offer courses remotely, truly remote, to other continents, other countries, it no longer is a zero-sum game where all of the postsecondary institutions in the US are trying to maximize their head count and then that reduces someone else’s. How do you grow the pie? That would be one of the thoughts.

I just want to address something that I would also say on the technology front, and it’s not hardware. It’s not what we’ve been talking about to this point. But it’s the use of AI. And if that stays as a silent topic, it’s not used and people don’t come to grips with how do you incorporate AI now into learning and how do you productively bring that in, then we’re creating graduates who are not entering the real world of work. I think that needs to become a valid topic. And instead of hiding it, it needs to be right out in the open. It’s like the old days of not allowing cell phones in the classroom. Find a productive use.

Craig: I couldn’t agree more

Cindy: We’re almost at the top of the hour and I always want to end with your parting thoughts. I don’t know, Nancy, if you have any more, but Craig, 1 minute, if you would.

Craig: It’s less than 1 minute, but I will say, I’m looking at my notes, AI was my closing thought, too, as we haven’t really talked about it. But I want to throw out AGI — artificial general intelligence — coming to our rooms in less than 2 years. Think of it as AI with current real-time intelligence to create truly immersive spaces that conform to the use of that space as we might imagine it. Start reading about AGI. It’s the next big thing in AI.

Cindy: Ah, right. Katie.

Katie: One of my biggest tenets is try to get out of your own office. We’re serving a campus, we’re serving the community, and I never realized how valuable it was to be in just campus events, hearing what is commonly discussed at those at that level, what the points of interest are. If you’re trying to do real research, see if you can get campus partners, find faculty that will let you or approve for you to watch their class remotely. Kind of observe and see how classes are really happening. Understand your faculty base, especially if you’re not getting responses to forms or email inquiries, maybe try to figure out unique ways to engage because we’re here to serve them. We’re here to help them. And you sometimes need to go to them to figure out what they want.

Cindy: Daniel. Parting thoughts.

Daniel: Sorry, I’ve been having a little technical trouble. Final thoughts are just I think we have more options today than we ever have for the technology solutions that are going on in our classrooms, in our spaces. When you’re thinking about the future of education technology, think about what the students have in their homes, in their daily lives. They’re going to expect, at minimum, that in the classrooms or certainly they’re going to probably expect a little bit better than that. So, keep that in mind as well, as you can’t expect the students to be excited to come to your classes in your university if the technology you’re offering is subpar to what they have in their own homes.

Cindy: Absolutely agree. And Nancy?

Nancy: Experiment every day. Get out on your campus, but get out to other campuses as well. There are good ideas everywhere.

Cindy: That’s a great thought. And you know what, the higher education community is just amazing at sharing information. They’re the best. There’s great organizations out there. I know you’re part of HETMA, you joined HETMA. CCUMC (actually, it’s now ETC). Yes, there’s some really wonderful organizations to join and it’s just a great community, so I couldn’t agree more. We are at the top of the hour and, once again, I’d like to thank our sponsors Atlona and Nureva and, of course, our panelists — Craig, Katie, Daniel, Nancy — and our audience for wonderful questions.

So, thank you again for joining us. Let’s keep the conversation going and have a great rest of your day.