Time for Change
The temperature is getting cooler, the leaves are changing colors, and time is changing. This month’s theme could be taken many different ways. We could look at the changes we need to make do to the pandemic, we can look at the changes we need to make do to new technology, but I am going to talk about the change we need to make to continue our mission of supporting the education of students.
Classes are starting up again and most universities are working hard to get back to the true college experience by bringing their students and teachers back into the classrooms. We are now making the change from our summer projects to supporting our classrooms. As we make this change we are going to need to leverage IT even more. We need to make sure our classrooms are working but many schools are working with limited resources. Unless you have an army of student workers this might fall on you and your small team. The use of remote monitoring software is key in making sure we can stay on top of our classrooms without over tasking our teams. The remote monitor software is going to let us know what is going on with equipment that can be monitor. It allow us to come across those issues before our faculty members do..
Another tool that we can use in our break/fix role is remote access software. Now the remote access software might be built into the remote monitoring software, which is great, but they can be different software as well. The remote access software can allow you to control the device remotely or even make changes remotely. For example accessing the web interface of a projector is a remote access software that allows us, from our desk, to turn on a projector, change inputs, or other settings that might need to be addressed. This save us time as we do not need to head to the room and handle these issues. Also it save times for the faculty member cause now the room could be up for them without waiting for a tech to come to the room.
The last thing I am going to talk about is setting up alerts and warning. Having the remote access software and the remote monitoring system is great but if you are not getting the alerts/warning then is it really helping you? For example some projectors allow you to set an hour limit on your lamps and when they get near that number of hours it will send an alert (text or email) to replace the lamp. Having these alerts coming to our phones via text or email is very helpful. We could be out in the field when an issue happens and if the alerts is not setup then the remote monitoring system might be displaying a warning but we don’t know about it until we return to our office. We can even setup alerts without having a remote monitoring software. Many systems allow for code to be loaded that when a device has an issue it will send an email.
Now we can not only rely on remote support and alerts. We deal with equipment that may not always be connected or can not be monitored remotely. For example a webcam is not a device we can fully monitor remotely as a user might had put tape over the lens, turn it to face a wall, or worst. Remote monitoring software is unable to pick up these types of issues so we still need to put eyes on the rooms. We can access the camera remotely but may only see a black video due to the tape and not know the issue is just tape over the lens. These IT tools are just that, tools in our belt to help us support our classrooms. They do not replace putting eyes on the space or even showing up to a room to provide support to faculty who might be struggling with the equipment.
