The technology enables higher ed

University Business, Sept, 2004 by Mark S. Valenti

I'm pleased to report that there's change in the air, much like ozone after a summer thunderstorm. The nature of the university lecture hall is changing, and in some cases as quickly as a lightning strike!

Higher education classrooms are still primarily a venue for lecture, although today it is frequently a technology-enhanced lecture. Over the past decade, IHEs have focused on a classroom technology complement that includes a computer, a network connection, and some degree of audiovisual presentation, three components that in concert provide the instructor with a powerful set of tools for lecture. This is a process in progress; many colleges and universities are still hard at work building basic lecture-presentation systems. Many instructors are still hard at work developing materials for such an environment. Many students, meanwhile, have moved well beyond the entire lecture concept.

Once the use of digital content becomes commonplace in the classroom, it is a logical and relatively easy next step to make those materials available to students on the campus network. Many instructors recognized this early on and started making class materials accessible via the Web. Today entire programs have begun to supplement class materials with audio and video recordings of the lectures that compose a course. Sometimes those signals are delivered in real time to remote students and are also stored for retrieval by students both on and off campus for subsequent review.

The classroom, once the domain of the professional lecturer, is fast becoming a multimedia-intensive, highly collaborative facility used to produce and consume media-rich materials. Today's students are adept at manipulating digital media of all types, and it's not an unreasonable leap to imagine students extracting the chunks of audio, video, and graphics that are most relevant to their interests or needs in order to develop an understanding of the requisite course concepts. It's another short hop to imagine those chunks being shared among members of an informal work group, or learning community, which has formed to help participants navigate the course together.

To manipulate audio and video content, specialized software applications running on high-powered, expensive workstations were the norm as little as five years ago. Today the same features are part of the package on consumer-grade workstations from a range of computer manufacturers.

The audiovisual wave, which began in earnest with the development of low-cost LCD projectors in the mid-1990s, continues to play out. Unlike telecommunications, personal computing, and data networking, the audiovisual component of the campus has not yet achieved respect as a mission-critical technology. That is changing rapidly, however, because in the classroom of the future, audiovisual tools coupled with reliable, high-performance networking will be essential. New developments in audio, video, digital broadcasting, and systems control, along with continuing advances in optical and wireless networking, point to a media-rich future.

From a systems perspective, low-cost digital signal processing (DSP) technology has revolutionized the design of audiovisual systems, from recording and postproduction to presentation and display. Today, sophisticated multipurpose rooms feature powerful, flexible systems that support a broad variety of applications, from basic PowerPoint to sophisticated multimedia conferencing such as Access Grid. When the user selects the desired mode, the system configures itself to provide appropriate functions, and it performs routine self-analysis to ensure that all components are working properly.

Another development emerging from the convergence of AV and IT is a new set of control and systems-management tools. Advantages include the ability to create a universal user-control interface for audiovisual systems across the institution and a significantly improved ability to manage audiovisual assets. A universal user-control interface lowers training and technical support costs and enhances usability of the audiovisual tools. The "Dashboard Project", an audiovisual industry collaboration between institutional end users and systems designers, is striving to create a set of universal user interface design principles. Further, an onboard tutorial (audiovisual, of course!) can require the first-time user to undergo basic training before proceeding with using the system. Updates, changes, or advanced training from a centrally administered, remote location might be handled as an in-house function or might be outsourced to a new, emerging class of systems integrator. System usage patterns, individual device status, user access, and remote troubleshooting are examples of IT functions incorporated in the audiovisual environment. New organizational and financial models, such as combination AV/IT help desks and lifecycle funding analyses, are helping manage a complex technology base.

These changes are also fueling a wave of development in the area of content management, as the diversity in available media--audio, video, graphics, digital images, and a host of file types from documents to spreadsheets and more--coupled with the personalization of content libraries make organization and accessibility of one's personal media "assets" paramount. For an institution, this is a challenge facing the campus library, but that's another subject altogether.