Summer Work

AV work and summers will be forever intertwined in my mind, probably because I started as a student worker in the summer. But it’s also because as we all know summer is the season where we are able to get the most done. When I started in the field, one of the most common things I would hear is “it must be so nice to have summers off!” It always brought a rueful chuckle because while K-12 faculty, and some higher ed faculty, have summers off, the educational AV folks are working at their hardest! In past years it was everything from gutting and renovating an entire classroom building to just “keep it running” maintenance. The funny thing is, I still think of the summer as a quiet time because fewer classes are running and buildings are quieter, even though in my experience we’re also full steam ahead on upgrades.

My last days as a student worker at Boston University, I was sent to work with our install department. They were preparing to upgrade around 30 classrooms which at the time had no AV installed (this was over a decade ago, remember.) They put me to work assembling the racks and getting them ready for installation. Ironically, two days before I started on staff, a small electrical fire caused damage to the racks that would, that fall, result in constant system failures, which resulted in even more summer work the next year.

Last summer was an atypical one, to be sure, and this year will be as well. To give you a picture of last year, at this time, we were using an entire classroom building as a warehouse to sort all the incoming equipment for our classroom upgrades under socially distant conditions. We were working with multiple contractors to do the upgrades. Our team worked under extreme pressure, not to mention the risk of the virus, and completed their part of the work admirably.

This year is a little different. Instead of rushing to upgrade our rooms, we’re able to take the time to make permanent some of the “temporary” installs we did last year. At the same time, we’re not doing the level of installs we normally do in the summer because of budget restrictions. The majority of installs we’re doing are related to permanent installs of videoconferencing systems and overhauling one of our premier spaces, though not much of that is AV-related.

But what about AV? Well apart from the obvious solutions I’ve talked about before I want to make an important point. We’ve spent the last 18ish months teaching and learning in a remote or hybrid posture, and there is no reason to ever go back to a sage-on-the-stage model. We now have an entire generation of students, from those in elementary school through the kids who just graduated high school, who are now skilled at remote learning and while they may be looking forward to their new college lives, will also be subject to the same thing that impacted them in K-12: weather, illness, disability, and the sheer volume of information they receive. So, what then do we do to make sure they can learn most effectively? We need to do two things, immediately.

(1) We need to recommit our classrooms to remote and hybrid learning. The genie, as they say, is out of the bottle on that, and we can’t put it back in. Just like adding AV systems in classrooms has now become standard, we’ve reached the next phase of that. Classrooms no longer need to be constrained by four walls, and anytime-anywhere learning is now outside the domain of schools that advertise on late-night TV shows, now it’s ready for prime time.

There are as many use cases as there are solutions that can be used to prove the educational value of hybrid and remote learning. From students with learning disabilities to students who are raising a family to students who simply have a harder time taking notes while participating in class, recording, streaming, and providing copies of classes is essential.

(2) We need to rethink the role of the AV team. Naturally, this takes longer than a summer, but it is something we absolutely need to do in the new normal. Historically, there has been a divide between the educational technology teams and the AV teams. We need to bridge that gap, then pave over it. AV staff, over the last year, have proven how critical we are to the pedagogical aims of the school. At Tufts, where I work, our team not only worked to upgrade the classrooms, but supported Zoom meetings and classes, trained faculty on the upgraded rooms, worked with faculty on how best to use the rooms for their classes, and refined systems to better serve the faculty over the last 18 months.

AV has always been the pointy end of the stick when it comes to faculty experience, and we need to be empowered to work directly with faculty on teaching and learning. So why am I bringing this up in summer work? Because this is an opportunity to take a summer like no other to begin to change our work model. If we play our cards right, this summer can be transformational for our field, allowing us to recruit a more diverse set of skills, and staff, as well as giving us a role in the future of education.

As I’ve said many times before, we’re at an inflection point in education. The pandemic has shown us that so many of the “traditional” ways of teaching and learning were outdated long before the pandemic hit, and are even more so now. By extension, many of the ways we handle AV in higher ed are perhaps outdated. Our siloed relationships with the educational technology and disability teams, in particular, should change to meet the times. So why not start in summer of rebirth, as we emerge not just from Winter hibernation (what? I live in New England!) but also from the last 18 months of pandemic-related lockdowns.

I want to close with one more point. Vaccines are safe, they are tested, they are important if we are going to keep the variants of COVID-19 at bay. If you haven’t gotten your vaccine yet, please please please, do it. This isn’t just because I did, this is because accessibility depends on it. We all have a responsibility to each other, as a society, as a field, as colleagues and I hope as friends, to make sure we don’t put each other or our students at risk. We have a responsibility to make sure that our colleagues in other verticals can get back to work. So please, make sure you get vaccinated if you haven’t because I want to see you all in Vegas in 2022.