Tech that teaches Features 07/01/2021 There are rumblings of a fundamental shift happening for the role technology plays in the education sector, from high schools to universities. Hurrairah bin Sohail explores further.Technology has always had a part to play in education. In the recent past, say six months ago, the discussion about technology in schools and classrooms was around how it could play a supporting role and augment learning environments.Today, due to the disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, technology is taking centre stage as it seeks to help education through a period of disruption.Robert Stacy, general manager for Asia Pacific at AJA Video Systems, says: “There is opportunity, not just in education but across multiple sectors of pro AV, to address the challenge of maintaining continuity and communication as businesses manage operations and communicate with their constituents. In a lot of respects, the industry is tackling this from the short-term point of view, doing what is expedient to get by. Long-term point, it’s up to the industry to determine what the future of education, government and business should look like. This will require careful examination of existing digital strategies, a process that will drive investment in equipment.”Stacy’s breakdown of looking at the impact of Covid-19 in the short term and long term bears exploration in further examining the shifting role of technology in education.Nikesh Kapadia, AV delivery manager – strategy & contracts, university operations, ITS at RMIT University in Australia, talks about RMIT’s initial response to the lockdown: “The first question we had was who needs to be on campus? And that really comes down to the course, like health sciences needs access to facilities on site and there will be a portion of students that need to access these facilities. But on the whole, we shifted to remote learning.”Kapadia goes into further detail: “We were lucky that we had a lot of the building blocks in place. If you look at it from a software platform standpoint, we had moved over to Canvas and that was a shift that happened some time ago. So, the transition to an online learning platform was already in place, we had the ability to access collaboration software, Teams, remote desktops and all the other pieces. While we could mobilise people, the biggest component for us was how do we support them when they are off-site versus on-site. How do we make them feel supported and enabled to still deliver educational content in the same way that they had planned? Obviously, each department had their own challenges with how they would do that. But from a technology standpoint, we were quite lucky that our direction and our path had been set several years ago.”The switch to online and remote learning platforms is something education institutes worldwide have made and run with for a few months now.Having operated in this manner, education end users are beginning to critically evaluate their choices.Kapadia says: “What does collaboration look like in education today? Is there a level of interaction? These questions are starting some interesting conversations internally as to what is the best method of engaging students. We need to consider the ‘blended learning’ side of things now more than ever, especially for bricks and mortar universities. They need to have plans in place to ensure that they can accommodate learning and teaching for those that want to be here in person and those who can’t. It is going to take us some time to land on a solution and I don’t think we can say that we have landed on a solution yet.”There have been some growing pains as Kapadia details: “Academics we have talked to have found it much more challenging to interact with students because the ability to shift focus and move from student to student, which you can do quite easily in a physical environment and in person, is completely different now. There are solutions, Teams has implemented a feature to allow you to raise your hand, but the conversation is not flowing organically.”Corey Gilliam, schoolwide theatre coordinator at Singapore American School, highlights a core issue with technology in learning spaces which holds true for videoconferencing and many other technology systems: “It is always difficult to measure engagement. You can always know how much a tool is being used, you can track data on its usage. But it is really hard to track engagement. In the classroom as well, it depends on what is happening from class to class. You may check into a session and see everyone is on their computers, but they might just be sharing content and working together and be really engaged. Or they might just be doing something completely unrelated to the session and be disengaged.”With experience comes insight and Kapadia says: “The concerns with videoconferencing in the past were things like the image quality not being great and then we devoted high amounts of bandwidth to get really good pictures. But is that important now? What about the content that is being transmitted which has now become an important component? We are being led by streaming platforms such as YouTube on what is acceptable when it comes to streamed content.”The evolution of the videoconferencing tools at their disposal is also helping fine tune remote learning experiences. However, a perfect solution has yet to be achieved. Kapadia says: “Teams is bringing the ability to have 49 current windows and when you look at that you can see how that will open a new set of possibilities in the classroom. But you really need to consider the requirements you have on-site and off-site for both staff and students. We’re still working on what that looks like and there is no definitive answer for us. But this idea of the ‘classroom of the future’ is what is really driving us, and it is a bit of trial and error and figuring out what works and what does not work. We need to provide a suite of options.”The ‘classroom of the future’ mentioned by Kapadia is an interesting concept to try and unpack. It is a vision that has changed significantly in light of recent events according to Kapadia: “The idea of a classroom was 100% a built environment driven solution. Just a few months ago, everyone thought that the classroom of the future was a built space that might be geared to have the ability to promote collaboration differently. But what we are saying now is that the classroom of the future may not be focused on the environment anymore but focused on the technology and the platforms that enable collaboration.”He continues: “The whole idea of a lecture theatre might be superseded by a three by three room which is a studio with multiple screens where we can have the same interaction as we would in a theatre enabled by technology. Students aren’t in the lecture theatre, but they may be sitting at home looking at the same content and hearing the same information.”The switch cannot be made without technology. Kapadia says: “Are we going to see more studios created to enable more offsite learning? That brings us to the question of what the production value is going to be for this? Are we happy to just record with a webcam? Or do we want to actually have proper lighting, proper acoustics and a proper microphone? Because with Canvas, we have the distribution of content already sorted. It is a matter of deciding how much we need to invest in content creation.”Kapadia also believes that a core driver for change will be the returning professors, lecturers and teachers who will have a new perspective on technology. He details: “Teachers will be demanding more, and we will start to see a spread in the utilisation of technology. I don’t know if that makes it easier for us. I expect the teachers to be back and starting conversations around whether we can support this or that based on their experiences teaching remotely. I think we will be working together to figure out what learning and teaching look like going forward and in all honesty I’m quite excited by what these changes bring.”Kapadia highlights a specific product vertical that the education sector will definitely be looking to deploy: “Investment into the streaming and recording side has definitely picked up. At RMIT, we were an opt-in university for lecture capture. But with the changes that have been implemented for tackling the disruption caused by Covid-19 and the shift to online learning, maybe we need to shift to an opt-out model. So, if all of our sessions are going to be natively recorded then we need to have the technology infrastructure to support this.”Stacy believes there might be a fundamental shift in how education is delivered: “Prior to digital, tape was used to move data around in broadcast environments. Even though digital technology and nonlinear editing were in play, everything ended up rolling off to tape. Then the tsunami struck Japan in 2011 and all the local tape factories were impacted. Suddenly, there was no more tape to use. It was a major tipping point that catapulted the industry toward tapeless workflows. There are parallels that can be drawn to this historic shift and that of Covid-19 and the rise in online education. While distance learning won’t become a full substitute for face-to-face education by any stretch, it will gradually become a more ingrained part of the overall curriculum, even as the pandemic lifts.”Then there is the consideration for social distancing in learning spaces. Kapadia details: “If we need to spread our classrooms, moving from say 50 students in one class to 25 students, then AV over IP solutions will be critical. With AV over IP we can just change the stream numbers and quickly have a space up and running and have that space available to teach and learn in.This is another area which will be on the rise. I think our AV-over-IP systems haven’t been leveraged in the past, they were used when rooms were at capacity and maybe we needed to link another space as an overflow room on an ad hoc basis. But now, maybe this becomes a more regularly needed option and AV over IP gives us the ability to scale the spaces accordingly and it provides the environments with flexibility.”Gilliam highlights: “Video in today’s world has to be quick and it has to be seamless. For us, we’ve been transitioning to a complete video announcement system inside our high school and a lot of that content is actually put together by our students. With the recent events, we’ve found that the video announcement system was actually really effective at delivering messages to our student body. The medium of video speaks to the younger generation really effectively.”In the end, it all comes back to the fact that while technology might be gaining importance, there is a higher objective that must be served and never lost sight of. Gilliam says: “When we look at investing in technology we look at two major features, reliability and ease of use and not just from the perspective of professional users. It is one thing for us to say that we have technology professionals who can do this for you. But, a lot of the times, the end user might be a teacher, or it might be a student. So, the technology has to be simplified to a point where there are no issues that might arise no matter who is using it. The technology has to be rock solid and it has to be user friendly.”Kapadia concludes: “ When you look at it across the board, student enrolment is obviously down and we are all fighting for a slice of that pie. The question for us is how do we best provide a solution and that level of inclusion expected anywhere and anytime from an education standpoint. If you look at this same problem from a professional standpoint, we want our staff to be able to work anywhere and anytime and we have worked to enable this. At RMIT we have moved people from desktop machines to laptops with tools and platforms for collaboration like Teams and virtual desktops. But from a learning and teaching standpoint, there is work to be done going forward to enable that same kind of mobility.”