After standardizing AV, UAMS can turn a classroom over in five days

Five days. That's how long the classroom technology team at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences now needs to turn a room over, according to an EdTech Magazine report by Erin Brereton.

It started with some simple counting. UAMS's original refresh plan called for a custom design in every room, which would have taken months. Before committing to it, Bailey's team went back through the previous few years of classroom design requests. 80% of them were identical. So the team wrote one basic equipment list that scales from a room seating 12 to 15 people up to one seating 250.

At UAMS, the classroom standard was already sitting in the request history: 80% of past room designs were identical.

The five-day figure changes when work can happen. Classes can usually be moved for a week, so UAMS can install the technology year-round. For a campus AV manager with many rooms to refresh, year-round installs could make the work easier to schedule. The same EdTech report follows the University of Rhode Island and Brandeis University through similar projects, and together the three show where the payoff lands: on the help desk, the spare-parts shelf and the instructor who walks into a room they've never taught in.

Rhode Island's quiet first week

In 2024, URI started replacing a mix of classroom AV components bought from several manufacturers with an AV over IP platform. Each converted room has a core processor that handles control and audio, video routing endpoints and a dedicated switch running the AV network, along with pan-tilt-zoom cameras, Sony projectors and Bravia displays, and wireless presentation devices. Many rooms have an Apple Mac mini, but instructors can bring their own laptops. Lead Information Technologist Jeffrey Levesque said one cable gets them a display, the room's USB audio and camera, and a charge, with both HDMI and USB-C connections available.

The IT team can now see system components and power cycle equipment remotely to fix issues. Levesque also keeps fewer spare parts on hand, which frees up his repair budget. In the first week of fall 2024 classes, staff waited by the phones for support requests about the new systems. Nobody called.

Brandeis took the same idea to its HyFlex rooms. CIO Jim La Creta said those rooms mostly use PTZOptics cameras mounted upside down on the front and back walls, which improves tilt and viewing angles, plus a ceiling-mounted Shure Microflex Advance MXA920 microphone. Some larger rooms use Sony, AVer and Crestron 1 Beyond cameras. Extron control processors and touch panels give instructors preset camera positions or manual control. La Creta's goal is a faculty member walking across campus into a room that looks like the one they just left. His team spends less time troubleshooting and instructors get faster fixes. The standard design also made lecture capture practical, and recordings go out through the learning management system.

A rack, a patch panel and one port map

A standard setup in every room suggests a technician doesn't need a drawing to fix any one of them. For campuses where guest lecturers and adjuncts move between rooms, that kind of consistency could also mean fewer help desk calls.

There's a procurement detail here that's easy to miss. UAMS's busiest rooms take Crestron VC-4 virtual processors, PTZOptics cameras, digital speakers, Shure and Sennheiser microphones, and displays from LG, Samsung and NEC. Three display brands fit on one equipment list. That suggests the parts that need to match are the layout, the controls and the wiring, so a campus can standardize without buying everything from one vendor.

Writing in Campus Technology in June, Will Smart argued that campuses usually make these decisions in the wrong order. An architect draws the first version of a room, often without input from the AV team, and sets a budget before anyone asks what the room has to do. His payoff is the same as UAMS's: a technician who knows the rack layout and cabling in Building A also knows Building F.

Where the savings show up, and how slowly

Erin Maher-Moran, board chair of the Higher Education Technology Managers Alliance and a classroom technology IT manager at Johns Hopkins University, told EdTech that more institutions are adopting uniform AV. She sees two main savings. Training gets simpler, with sessions held in one place and fewer video tutorials to produce. Buying gets easier too: with the same equipment in every room, a school can order 100 of something, possibly get a volume discount, and justify the same build in every space.

Marlo Gaddis, a K-12 education strategist at Dell Technologies, made a similar case in eSchool News in October. She was writing about student devices, but the reasoning carries over to classroom AV. Running several platforms means technicians have to know all of them, the parts inventory multiplies, software images drift apart, and every repair depends on which brand broke. Standardizing lets technicians specialize, makes bulk parts stocking practical, makes same-day swaps realistic and opens the door to in-house refurbishment. She suggests modeling support staff, spare parts and management tools over four to five years, using the Consortium for School Networking's total cost of ownership calculator. For an AV program, URI suggests where some of those savings could show up: Lead Information Technologist Jeffrey Levesque's repair budget has been freed up because he can keep fewer extra parts on hand, according to EdTech Magazine.

Maher-Moran said remote learning during the pandemic pushed colleges to raise technology and support budgets, but most still can't afford to roll a new standard into dozens of rooms at once. Brandeis opts to update a certain number of rooms a year. URI, two years in, is at roughly half. That means campuses run two kinds of rooms for years, and the support savings grow only as more rooms convert. The approach also fits some campuses better than others. UAMS's 80% left a fifth of its requests outside the template, and a campus with many specialty labs or performance spaces would find less to standardize.

Measuring it on the help desk

In a CDW survey of 954 IT decision-makers across industries, 37% said they measure workplace friction by help desk tickets and support volume. Conor Waddell, a CDW senior vice president, recommends tracking ticket volume, resolution time and user feedback. URI's version was the phones that stayed silent in the first week of fall classes. Rooms that get the same build are easy to compare before and after, so the tickets show whether the standard is working.

A few checks can be pulled from what these three campuses did:

1. What share of past room design requests were identical? UAMS's 80% is one benchmark to compare against.
2. How many days does one room turnover take, and is it short enough to install during the school year?
3. Can a failed room come back from a spare rack, with the same port numbers it had before?
4. Are ticket volume and resolution time tracked per room, so converted and unconverted rooms can be compared?

At URI, instructors have started asking for the upgrade. Levesque said the question he hears most is when the new system is coming to the room they teach in. Half the classrooms are still waiting.