Full marks to audio and visual technology – it’s changing education forever.
The ways students learn, the ways teachers teach: the smart, powerful, and unified nature of the tools at their disposal is transforming it all.
School, colleges and universities are already very different environments compared to just a few years ago, and the next several years are likely to see further fast-paced evolution.
For vendors and their reseller partners, opportunities in the sector are everywhere.
Here, Marc Remond, President (APAC) at leading global wholesale and direct provider Kramer, shares his expert insight into the top five areas of focus likely to shape the future of education’s audiovisual experience revolution…
1. Space
Flexibility is key. For one session, classrooms and ampitheatres may be set up for didactic teaching, with seats in rows and an educator at the front of the room. For another session, students may be in small groups in the same space, doing collaborative work. That means the traditional single projector or whiteboard on the wall is no longer enough. When students break into groups, multiple displays are needed. They will want to annotate and collaborate, and then they may be required to share the outcome of that brainstorming session with the rest of the class, meaning transferring the content in real time onto the big screen. Of course, universities and business schools will continue to have large 300-seat lecture halls which require four to six projectors, but smaller rooms will be reconfigured in ways which enable the furniture to be moved around. Students will face different walls with different screens displaying different content. Also, many universities want to provide overflow capacity for when there are not enough seats. They want to stream live video and audio to a different room or even a different campus. By deploying IP-based audio and video technology, it all becomes easily possible.
2. BYOD
Students are probably more wed to their personal devices than any other section of society. That’s why a Bring Your Own Device strategy is and will continue to be a crucial element of educational establishments’ technology offering. Miracast, for Windows and Android devices; Airplay, for Apple Mac, iPhone and iPad users; and Google Cast for a range of devices offer multiple means of connecting and sharing wirelessly. Also, at Kramer, we have identified USB-C as super-important going forward, with the iPhone 15 now featuring a USB-C port. Students not only have the ability to connect to the network, they can also charge their devices and have wireless access to any USB peripheral connected to the system such as audiovisual equipment or a projector. It’s about providing that all-encompassing, convenient, and reliable connection experience in the classroom and across the campus.
3. Engagement
This is a big one. Every educator, every school, every university recognises the fact that the more the students are engaged, the more they will retain knowledge and the higher they will score. However, there are so many choices and everything is on demand. If it’s not instantly engaging, they’ll switch to something else. They are also more demanding as to the quality of content that they expect to consume. Educators will have to introduce interactivity and collaboration into the classroom just to get students to show up. A laptop and a projector will no longer be enough. Students will demand higher quality, 4K and 8K multi-media content; swapping from images to videos to potentially introducing Augmented Reality into the class, or even have some kind of Audio, Video, Lighting (AVL) support for more scientific classes. Educators will need to provide two-way, real-time annotation functionality so that students have to pay attention. It’s not just the technology itself: educators will need to adapt the way they teach and encourage students to leverage the technology in order to contribute during the class. Technology has the power to transform the classroom and to help deliver it all.
4. On-Campus Learning
The pandemic is over and universities and business schools want students back onto the campus. They rightly believe that on-campus living and learning is a valuable part of the overall academic experience. Prior to the pandemic, many international universities and business schools in particular focused their marketing on the location country as the value proposition, such as Australia because of the lifestyle and the fact that it’s English-speaking. Then, during the pandemic, it was about establishments’ abilities to deliver online learning via the most advanced technology, such as China. Now, and going forward, it is about students returning to campus because they get the best of both worlds: the physical and cultural experience of living and learning with other like-minded people, and classrooms equipped with the very latest hardware and software. Also, there is an important commercial imperative at play too. Universities have invested heavily over the last 20 years in physical real estate for lecture theatres, offices, and student accommodation. Attracting students back is critical if those investments are to generate a return.
5. Educator Support
We find that around 20% of teachers and educators are hungry for more technology to help them deliver a better learning experience, but 80% are happy with the standard, basic use case. That means educator support is critical. Many teachers struggle in the modern, tech-equipped classroom because a cable is disconnected and they don’t know how to do this or that. There’s a lot of hand-holding still required. The key is to keep it as simple as possible. We provide our reseller partners and their education sector end user customers with extensive set-up support and training to help ensure that practitioners have the skills to make the most of our technology. It’s about giving users confidence. The future classroom will be a much more hi-tech environment going forward; we have to make sure that educators keep pace.
To learn more about how Kramer can help your and your customers’ leverage the huge education sector opportunity, click here
