As I mentioned last month, ITS is shifting the focus of classroom support 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. Our normal summer upgrade process, which touches roughly a fifth of the classrooms every year, is our first significant chance to make changes.
Upgrading the technology
This summer we are upgrading the electronics in 19 classrooms, and we’re using the opportunity to move to a more standard hardware design. We’ve always worked to have a consistent user interface on the touch panels, as well as a common set of tools (document cameras, DVD players, etc); by making the components behind the scenes more consistent we will be increasing reliability by decreasing complexity, and making it much easier to replace pieces in the event that they fail. Although the eagle-eyed among you may note that the logo on the touch screens changes from AMX to Crestron, this should otherwise be an invisible change from your perspective.
Faster support
We are also exploring ways to reduce the time it takes to get support in a classroom while teaching. One approach we’ll be taking is to change how x7070 works when you call it. At the moment, it is a standard phone line: you call one number, and one phone on the other end rings. We will be upgrading it to a more robust system to broaden the pool of staff able to take the call during class time. We are also experimenting with changing how it behaves based on which physical classroom you call from: a call from Boliou, for instance, could potentially ring in the CMC, instead of in Weitz, facilitating a faster response.
Classroom readiness
Finally, we will be changing and expanding the checks we do in classrooms to ensure they are ready for use. By testing more aspects of each room’s configuration, we expect to reduce the number of issues at the start of term. This expanding list of checks will also serve as the basis of the mid-term checks we will be performing during each term next year.
For information about summer classroom upgrades, please see this article in Carlpedia.