Home products for video conferencing are not suitable for classrooms, especially hybrids. Designing classrooms of this type will require an interdisciplinary work team.
By Juan Tamayo, CTS-D*
In this opinion column I want to share some thoughts that have been hanging around my head lately since I have had the opportunity to talk with teachers, who have migrated "technologically" due to the current situation of Covid-19.
Neither the educational institutions, nor the students nor the companies of installation of audio, video and integration of experiences were prepared to assume these changes, in a few months we had to go from a traditional education, little modern, almost without technology to a virtual education through a cell phone or computer screen. Big technological changes, but have we had a chance to help end users in those changes?
And the question will possibly bother some in this writing, but they have asked about his experience to a university professor who has possibly taught his subject for 20 or 30 years on a chalk board or marker and force him to move to a computer in which making the content is much more complex and its reproduction can be tedious for some people. If migrating paper notes to accessing an account at a university to upload notes electronically took a while, at least a year for some institutions, now, what would that technology migration of moving from a dashboard to an app have been like?
I have the case of a teacher who has to pay from his salary to an "assistant" to help him upload the content, send emails and make presentations, because his electronic experience is little. In 2002 when I was studying my second year of engineering I had a class in the auditorium because the teacher had the classes in PowerPoint (a technological revolution) and since that time I was interested in the subject and observed that the teacher took up to 15 min to configure the class, it was a video projector in VGA with DB-15 cable, it didn't require anything else, it had no sound, and he also sold us a compact disc with the classes for 30,000 Colombian pesos, about US$15 at the time, because the content belonged to the instructor.
As experts in audio, video and integration experiences, we must be aware that our developments require training, require quantifying the time of education and support to solve doubts, so I invite educational institutions to demand this item every time they acquire technological equipment, a free or low-cost installation will guarantee little help when solving concerns. The design of hybrid rooms that are now booming since educational institutions are in the semi-face-to-face will require robust designs, fixed computers that the teacher only has to turn on and functions without the need to connect external elements, try to make it the least plug & play and more stand alone, rather, that they do not have to connect anything and that they work with the least possible configuration.
I cannot talk about technologies because there are many on the market, and I believe that good designs do not depend on technology but on the designer and application. The design must be robust enough that it is teacher-proof that they deconfigure them, and this leads me to another point that will be fundamental to educational institutions and that is to have a person commissioned by a group of rooms to help in technical support to teachers, and yes, teachers will have to upload their technological education but it is also the obligation of institutions to help them with this work, the technology is not simple or arrives alone, it requires a support that is in constant revision so that the rooms do not fail and the set-up time is minimal so that the students do not lose interests in the class, which is the greatest objective of any design, to ensure that the student is always connected in every way to the class.
During the week that I wrote this column and analyzed with friends of the industry was the Avixa Congress, which in my opinion deserves a rating of 10, since it brought us to the reality of what happens at the level of education and design of spaces for this purpose, fortunately I could verify several theories that months ago hovered around my head:
Teachers are no longer teachers, they are generators of contention. In hybrid education systems teachers must create content to teach, moving from a whiteboard to a PowerPoint, Prezi or video requires an additional degree of design, requires the teacher to have a work team that knows marketing to indicate strategic guidelines to hook the student to the class.
Home products for video conferencing are not suitable for classrooms, especially hybrids. Designing classrooms of this type will require an interdisciplinary work team that takes into account audio, video, acoustics, but, most importantly, it must link and include the education staff who will be working day by day in this space.
And finally, audio capture is still the main item and least thought about in the development of classrooms, you still think about wireless systems, soundbars with built-in microphones, a point microphone, but what they do not think is that a class without video can be done (remember the distance education by AM stations that many governments did), but a class without audio or with poor audio is very complex to perform, so my invitation for those who read this article is to invest a little time in sound design with microphones and with so many technological advances, the application can be done very easily.
I thank Avixa for the very interesting congress they held, and that will possibly help us to have a more technical vision about the development of classrooms, and to the educational institutions that can read this writing I invite you to start employing technical personnel that will help you develop hybrid classrooms, you will not buy equipment, but they will invest in improving the education of their students.
*Juan Tamayo, CTS-D, is an electronic engineer and currently serves as Manager of T-Árbol Audiovisuales SAS, product application engineer for Latin America for International Sales and Support Engineer for Synthax Inc.
