Mark Coxon recently wrote a blog with his reflection of InfoComm 2024. In it, he questions where the innovation in AV has gone. To him, InfoComm looked like a bunch of companies all trying to one up each other by adding minor features to products everyone is selling. Take a moment and read the blog (linked above). I completely agree with Mark. In fact, I wrote about the topic back in 2022. I want to take the post one step further though, and give some helpful feedback to the manufacturers out there that are developing products for the educational space. In addition to saying, “hey your products have gotten kind of boring,” let me tell you some things that would be really useful in today’s higher ed classrooms.

These ideas come from my experiences in watching college students in classrooms. There is no question that the students live on their technology. I get that many of us think that is not great — but we need to get over it. That horse is out of the barn. Telling students to put away their technology is equivalent to telling them that for the next 60-90 minutes we are going to not live in reality. We need to embrace and engage the students where they are. I think we need to get rid of projectors and TVs in the classroom and engage students on their devices.

Audio has often been considered last in our classrooms. The big display in the front of the room has been the focus of installs and where the big money is spent. Yet, unless you can hear what is going on in a room and participate in that discussion (and that means be heard by others), then the quality of the video does not matter much. This is why I believe that a product that allows computers, cell phones, tablets and AirPods to connect to the audio system in a room would be a game changer. The system would need to allow the students in the class to hear what is going on, along with allowing them to participate in the discussion via the built-in mics in their devices. Along with engaging the students in a way that makes sense to them, it would also provide support to students who have difficulties with hearing. In order to accommodate even more students, making this product produce live captioning would be even a bigger boon. Hint: Here is another note to pay attention to college-age students. More and more of them are turning on closed captioning on their devices when streaming. They want this service.

The next step is to take the content that would normally be on a projector or display and push it to the students’ personal devices. Whether this be a tablet, phone or computer — students should have the full suite of sources directly in front of them. Along with being able to follow along, they should be able to interact and share with the rest of the classroom.

What are the challenges to these products? I think the biggest challenge is developing these products that will work on a variety of network configurations with next to zero latency. They simply will not be used if they have a delay. This is where the really smart engineers can get to work.

Where can they skip out? Don’t make the product overly complicated. Don’t put in the ability for people to “raise their hand” and be given permission from the professor to speak. We don’t do that now. In a classroom, a student could shout out any time they want, and if it is inappropriate or at the wrong time, the professor will handle it. Additionally, they can still raise their physical hand and speak when the professor calls on them. This can be exactly the same with the technology. Don’t make the professor learn something complicated.

Some of these products may exist in some form, but I personally have yet to see a demonstration of any of these products that work seamlessly in a live environment. If I am wrong and you are a manufacturer that makes any of these products, reach out, I would love to see a demo. If you are right and you have a great product, I will certainly write about it and correct myself.

OK — go start innovating!