This document discusses trends in classroom technology for business schools. It outlines various smart devices and collaboration tools used in classrooms, rising student loan debt, and alternative teaching styles like flipping the classroom. It also details the large costs of equipping classrooms and buildings with advanced technology, providing examples of specific university investments. Key decisions around technology include fundraising, hiring experts, faculty training, and support.
Georgia Tech - 18 classrooms $6mUniversity of Georgia, Terry College Executive Education Center, Atlanta, GA – 4 classroom, $800kUniversity of Tennessee, Knoxville; $7m, 34 classroomsWilliam & Mary, Mason School of Business, $2.5m, 16 classrooms.
Minimum investment per classroom ~$30,000Trading rooms can be very expensive. William & Mary invested nearly $300,000 in their trading room, but held back on a number of options. Costs for a fully equipped trading room can be significantly higher than $300k.
On average the technology in the classroom will need to be replaced on a 7 year cycle. Therefore, you should budget ~15% of your initial investment every year to maintain the equipment.Labor to install, configure, and support these updates will also be an added expense. So overall, you should plan for 20-25% of your initial investment in your ongoing budget.
Images:Digital Signage – William & MaryTrading Room and Team Rooms – Bentley CollegeLecture Capture – Tegrity vendor website.
Thank you Brad. Wish I had had your decision framework when we were planning our building. It’s a please to be at the 2011 Summer Educator's Workshop. The James A Haslam Business building has been a once in a career (lifetime) opportunity for me and many others in the College. In my case, it’s and end of career project that I probably didn’t deserve and that I spent a good part of the last decade working on. As you can see from Brad’s slide with UT modifications, our Dean, Jan Williams, was not Dr. Scrooge. Please remember that our technology decision point was July 2007, a year before the targeted opening of Fall 2008 which slipped to Spring Semester 2009 (Jan opening). What we set out to do in 2007 required a lot of custom work to integrate the HD AV and IT functions. Today, some of these functions have been incorporated into products by AV market leaders. My hope is that you will take away from this conversation that it is possible to have consistent & easy to use technology integrated into a building from both an academic and building management perspective. I also hope that you will see the great benefits that it has brought the college and become aware of some of the traps that may await you as and if you take this journey. My plan is to give you a snapshot/overview of the building and it’s costs/funding, describe our original design objectives with some positive and negative stories, describe the classroom and team rooms in a little more depth and review some lessons that we hoped we’ve learned. Let’s start with a visit to the Master’s Investment Learning Center.
The building is actually two buildings (a renovated 1/3 of the old Glocker Building plus a new 6 floor building) that are attached by a 3 story glassed Atrium. The two buildings are aligned on the 3rd floor. The UG Programs office is positioned to be at the main entrance to the building. One of the design concepts we saw at the Univ of Minnesota, Carlson School of Management was casual confortable seating nooks and crannies that they called huddle spaces. In the Haslam Building, you will find coaches in the atrium, benches by the classrooms and graduate/executive lounge areas in our attempt to give the students another place to stay/work/relax/interact between classes. Let’s take a quick look @ our West Wing BOD meeting room.
This is just a quick picture of how the space has been allocated. I will say the chairs for the undergraduate students are harder than the chairs for graduate students and exec ed participants.
While you look at our Design Objectives that the building fulfilled, let me tell you a few stores to highlight the good and the bad of the what we did.Story 1: BA353 Business Simulation Course Taken by every CBA major, MBA, exec MBA student in college. 1,000 students per year. Venture Capital presentation Day is a day where 100 + teams of students request money from venture capitalists and are evaluated by their coaches. The team rooms are always busy leading up to these presentation and we have even had students sneak back into the building after hours to use the team rooms. After their preparations in the team room, the students present the case in our classrooms and each presentation is recorded, edited and sent to the coaches for post liive evaluation. The faculty coaches have found the streamed presentations to be very helpful in assisting/critiquing their students. We have up to 7 classroom captures going at the same time without the system blinking. The tech support staff has created a windows application that allows for us to view the status of the 24 capture systems on one screen with easy navigation to individual capture sessions. The lead professor, Ernie Cadotte (who is also the creator of “Marketplace” software used in the simulation course has stated that the quality of the presentations and the quality of the learning has been raised for every student level.Story 2: Interactive Collaboration Center. You would think that a brainstorming room with electronic flip charts would be desired by faculty/students/staff or at least that is what we thought. We implemented the Thunder System from Polyvision only to have the stop supporting the system about 9 months after the building was opened. We were unable to proactively promote use of this room and one of the most visible spots in the building currently has minimal use. Story3:
Guidebar Custom Control System Multiple Source Image Projection Annotation over multiple source projectionSelf Service (or directed) CaptureVideo conferencing in 5 classrooms2 touch-clicks to call for helpSources/Control System FunctionsComputer in Podium SourceLaptop Source (DVI or VGA)DVD Player SourceStreaming TV (including HD) SourceiPod/now iPad SourceCeiling Doc Cam SourceTelephone/Sound System Integration2 touches help available
If you ask a student about the team rooms you will probably get one of two responses:They are great.Why can’t I use them. Note: They are restricted to Juniors, Graduate Students, Global Scholars (in their sophomore year)Question to Deans – How many of you have team rooms that the college manages?? How do you manage them? We’ve made them self service to the students who are eligible to use them and keep them locked when not in use.Students can get on web and make 1 reservation a day (1 hr for UG, 2 hr for grads) – 24 hours in advance or they can find an empty team room and make an immediate (ad-hoc) reservation for either 30 minutes or an hour. Person who makes reservation can select his team members for the reservation and then the team members can also swipe in using their campus ID card. Accounts for the system are created via an electronic file transfer from the Banner System. Once in team room, students can hook up their laptops to the LCD, use the team room computer (behind the LCD) with a flash drive, plug in their computers and/or use the “Teamspot” software to share files/screens securely with others in the room.Each kiosk manages a group of team rooms (2-5).
As I reviewed the process the college went thru to define, design and implement the elements of this building a number of actions that we took stood out. This list on the slides are related to technology, but do not include the important process of involving faculty and students in the definition process including their participation in trips to other relatively new buildings. In terms of the technology, the fund raising for technology which was discussed previously comes out on top. After that there were a number of firsts that were experienced as part of this process. The College was the first one to hire an AV architect to ensure that the building and AV equipment were in sync. In the first 3 days of the initial project, they reviewed each space in terms of sound, line of sight to projector and ceiling height to determine space/seating adjustments that needed to be made to the architects room design. In many ways they “paid for” their hiring during that short span of time. The college took a very aggressive attitude toward keeping this “our project” that was reflected in our 100% attendance at construction meetings. Tom Ladd was there to make sure our voice was heard. I still remember the lunch I had with the AV Designer/consultant to tell them their approach to what is now our RASS system was inadequate and they would no longer be involved in the project. The problem was the person who made that decision (me) would have to take over that project. He/me really didn’t have the time to be a Director and a building project manager.. However he/I had no choice.
This is one case where we needed a programmer to work with the software vendor rather than have the director take on this project in spite of his experience as a mainframe and micro programmer. Fortunatly, the experienced staff was able to be “self managed” .. As much as that is possible. Once again, Tom Ladd made the decision to ban overhead projectors from the building after seeing them sitting in corners of classrooms at Ohio State and Minnesota. With the custom annotation of the control system being more effective as an emphisizer/linker, we decided that each classroom would have a ceiling doc cam that could serve as a new and improved overhead projector. Support and training was emphasized. Each faculty member was trained prior to their first class. Additionally, during our 1st week, we physically checked with each professor prior to the beginning of her/his class which turned out to be great customer service. That service would have been a lot more difficult if we did not have the centralized room scheduling system (one key element of the room access/scheduling system. BTW, it takes just 2 touches for a faculty member to call the person @ the help desk. - Our decision to use HD and IP where it was possible led to a custom system with many pieces that had to be made to work together. We are still glad we stuck with high definition and we hope that it will extend the initial replacement cycle that we would face, but there is little question that custom systems are hightmaint.
After being “open for business” for 2 years, the issues that the technology support group faces in their support of their custom AVIT systems are:Continued dependence on the AV Designer for control system program support.Continued dependence on the RASS programmer/developer. Continuing in 90% react mode, limiting the time spent reaching out to faculty/students, improving documentation, improving/upgrading/expanding systems, preparing for the replacement of equipment that we know is coming and implementing new and innovative projects in AV, Web (including social networking/mobile). Retrofitingeletriity @ select classrooms and huddle spaces. In spite of our best efforts of including the central AV staff in the design of the AVIT systems of the building, we would have been better of with the staff that had the skill sets needed to support the systems as early as possible. Our 1st AV support person (who has been GREAT) started 2 months prior to the opening of the building. I would have been much better had we had him during the design of the AV systems. The same could be said for the integrated room access/scheduling system. A .net programmer has been needed for some time in addition to operational/training staff. In retrospect, we have a buidling that the faculty and students love, has brought pride to both the college and univ.With that I’ll turn it back to Hugh for a few last tips.