“All the world’s a stage,
William Shakespeare
And all the men and women merely players”
First, I want to congratulate our friends over at the Consortium of College and University Media Centers (CCUMC) on their name change and new branding to the Educational Technology Collaborative (ETC)! The new name better reflects the current membership and interests of the organization! Also, thank you for another great conference!
I attended the CCUMC conference at the University of Central Florida in Orlando earlier this month. The keynote speaker was Theron Skees, and he talked a lot about a book I’ll need to read someday: The Experience Economy by Joseph Pine II and James Gilmore. Those two authors also have a great article in Harvard Business Review you should go read. The upshot of Theron’s talk, the book, and the article is this: our economy is no longer based around products and basic services, it is based around experiences. It really is no accident that InfoComm International changed their name to the Audiovisual and Integrated Experience Association (AVIXA); and likewise, when I had the opportunity to rebrand my own team at Iowa State University, I followed their lead and named the team the Audiovisual Experience Team (AVXT). One of the biggest topics in IT (which includes AV – #AVisIT) right now is UX – user experience. We are absolutely in the business of experiences.
What we do in AV is really to create, support, and enhance experiences for our clients. In our case, our clients are students, and our stages are classrooms. My teammate, Spencer Braly, recently said that “Classrooms are simply event spaces where most of the events happen to be classes.” I really stopped when he said that – he is 100% correct. If we are just thinking about our spaces with more of a services mindset than an experience or event mindset, we are missing opportunities to truly enhance the educational experience our students receive.
So, where do we start? Here are a few ideas:
First, start to consider this quote from Pine and Gilmore: “Companies should think about what they would do differently if they charged admission.” In reality, we DO charge admission, it’s called tuition. But accounts receivable are far away from us, and it is easy to forget about that in our day-to-day operations. Students are paying attendees to their daily events (aka classes). What aspects of the experience they receive from the time they walk through the door to the time they leave are under our ability to control? If we were a company that was charging students admission at the door to each class, what might we do differently? In-state tuition at Iowa State for upperclassmen in engineering is roughly $5800. Let’s assume a student has 16 credit hours and the semester is 16 weeks long; that would be approximately 256 classroom hours. $5800 / 256 hours is approximately $23 per hour. Now, granted that is not what a ticket costs to see Hamilton, but it is more than I spend on a movie here in Iowa. How would you feel about your classroom experience if you were standing at the door collecting $23 admission from each student?
Second, seek out the experience your clients are looking for. When I worked as an integrator, at the end my role was pre-sales engineer. I did a lot of site visits and needs analyses. I would do my best to avoid getting down into the technical details, at least at first. I would start by asking the experiential questions:
- “From the time a person walks into this room, until the time they leave, what experience would you want them to have?”
- “When an attendee leaves this room, how would you define if they were successful?”
- “What are your typical use cases and workflows?”
We would offer to sit in the back corner of one of their existing rooms, and just watch what happens – how does the meeting unfold, how do people interact, what do they attempt to accomplish? When was the last time you sat in the back of a classroom (or your President’s board room) and just watched what happens? Do you even know? Another idea is to take a survey of your faculty and ask them their thoughts. Some questions I asked in my last survey were:
- “What keeps you up at night in terms of teaching a class?”
- “If you could wave a magic wand and get a classroom with magical new technology that can allow you to teach exactly like you want to teach, what would that look like? Feel free to think outside the box and dream big!”
- “Right now, instructors have to adjust their teaching style to match the available technology. If we were to flip the script on that, and provide you with something that you’re aware of that matched your preferred teaching style, what would that be? Describe what makes it ideal for you.”
Third, design with experience in mind. The first step is to write a functional narrative. Focus on the what the technology needs to do in the room instead of what it is. In many cases this is a great start to a scope of work. Consider designing the GUI and documenting the automations in the room as the first thing in the design instead of the last thing. Don’t let the wiring diagram determine how the GUI and automation will work, allow the GUI and automations to guide the development of the wiring diagram.
Like many of my articles, I write about the things I know my own team should be doing; putting it out in public helps motivate me to practice what I preach! This is one of those articles. The keynote at CCUMC and the comment from Spencer have really prompted me to contemplate again about the classroom experience and to live up to the name I chose for our team.
Let me paraphrase Shakespeare in terms of higher education AV: “Every classroom is a stage, and the instructors are merely players.” That leaves the students as the audience of what should be a memorable event. We are the technical team for the stage – lighting, audio, and special effects. Let’s make the best performances we possibly can!
