The departure of a staff member from a position they’ve held for years raises both concerns about possible gaps in knowledge and opportunities to reevaluate how we do something. Jim Pierret’s retirement, after 22 years of designing and maintaining Carleton’s classroom and presentation spaces, is no exception. Losing Jim’s knowledge after his years of deep involvement with these spaces has caused ITS some trepidation about keeping things running smoothly. However, we’ve used the several months between his decision to retire and his actual retirement date to re-examine the role of his position and how we make use of our vendors to provide us with technical expertise.
Since Jim started, the technology in classrooms has shifted from being a nice-to-have addition that wouldn’t derail the class if it didn’t work to a vital necessity around which the class is frequently structured. Additionally, the work of designing and installing the technology into the classroom has changed from being one-off, hand-built systems to being standardized and component-based. This simplifies designing the rooms and lets us shift the burden of programming and hardware support to our vendors, allowing us to rewrite the position description to emphasize supporting the teaching experience: making sure that the technology runs smoothly, being highly responsive to issues as they arise, and having regular feedback from the professors who use the technology on a daily basis.
Preventing Issues
Obviously, it is always better to fix or prevent issues before they become disruptive. To that end, we’re instituting regular, twice-per-term proactive checks of all the equipment in all the classrooms. Our current plan is to work through our checklist at the beginning of each term and again on midterm break day for each classroom, making sure all the AV equipment works properly. We’ll also be doing spot-checks throughout the term on heavily used, unusually complicated, and historically problematic rooms to try to catch as many potential problems as early as possible.
Managing Problems
It isn’t always possible to predict or prevent issues, however, so we’re also making changes to reduce our response times for problem reports, emphasizing greatly reducing how long it takes to get to a broken classroom. We also recognize, though, that having someone appear to try to fix a problem while class is being taught is disruptive, and we’ll be exploring ways to allow easy problem reporting with a request for a delayed response.
Improving Communication
In order to balance and evaluate the changes we make, we need to ensure we’ve got lots of ways to get feedback from the people using the spaces. We’ve already started with some very simple (but effective!) methods, such as having a staff member present at the beginning or end of classes to both observe how things go and to be able to talk to the professor about their experience. We’ll be asking for more feedback about potential classroom changes, as well, and we’re planning a usability study in the fall for the touch screens that control each classroom.
We are excited to be making these changes to our classroom support model, and we look forward to partnering with the professors using the rooms to make the experience as reliable, predictable, usable, and powerful as possible.