Jerry Garcia and crew certainly had it right when they sang, “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” Seventeen months ago, colleges and universities around the country abruptly shut down in-person learning and sent students home. Over the summer of 2020, they worked to make sure their faculty and students were prepared to learn and teach in a variety of new and different ways. Come the fall, different colleges took different approaches to the pandemic, some being fully remote while others were fully in-person. As the school year ended in 2021, people were starting to feel a sense of relief. The fall of 2021 would be back to normal!

Yet, things are not quite that simple. Here we are in August of 2021, seventeen months after this all began, and we are perhaps less sure than ever of what is going to happen. The Delta variant is expanding exponentially across the country. Breakthrough cases, while rare, continue to happen. In the last few weeks, discussions of masks, even in vaccinated people, have started to take hold again. The CDC is suggesting (only suggesting at this point) that all students in K-12 schools wear masks. There is no doubt that these are serious considerations and there is a high possibility that the suggestions could turn into a requirement. 

So, where does this leave colleges and universities, and how does that affect the AV teams supporting them? I believe that we will continue to be teams that help support our institutions and keep them running. I have learned from talking with colleagues around the country that most of them have spent a lot of time (and money) over the summer break upgrading classrooms. No surprise they are also all reporting that microphones, cameras, soft conferencing and recording have become part of the standard build. In fact, several people I have talked to have told me their install schedule has been so booked, even those who are in-house integrators have been hiring external help to get through the rush. This is great news for the manufacturers and integrators who suffered so greatly during the beginning of the pandemic. 

The question that now remains is whether we built these rooms for the ultimate flexibility. I believe that is what most schools are going to see over the next few months. There is a wide berth of approaches colleges are taking to the vaccines. Some are requiring students to get and show proof of vaccines to attend. Others are only encouraging it, and others are requiring non-vaccinated students to wear masks. What this means is that COVID will be an issue when schools open in the fall. Students will still have to be tested and there will still be needs for quarantine and isolation. In classrooms, you will have a mix of students wearing and not wearing masks, and the same goes for faculty. So, while last year was new and crazy, it was more predictable. Some faculty chose to teach completely online. Masks were not an issue in this case. Students and faculty in classrooms all had masks on and there was no mix.

Technology managers will need to be prepared this year for requests at any moment to go from an in-person class to a remote class. They will also need to be completely prepared for a hybrid/flexible learning environment. This is what I believe is going to be most of what we see this year. If faculty or students test positive for the virus, they will still need to isolate as they have done in the past. With the amount of time required for isolation (7-10 days) and the number of times this will occur, it will be impossible to tell a student that they just need to catch up on their work and miss all those classes. We will have to provide some resources, whether it be synchronous or asynchronous, or even a mix. This continues to be a good environment for integrators to help their clients build these rooms in reliable and easy-to-use ways. This may also be a great time for integrators to offer service contracts on these rooms. Technology will be critical to having another successful academic year, and schools will likely be willing to pay for that reliability. 

Looks like we will have to just keep truckin’ on.