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About This Guide
The education environment has never been more challenging, but cutting-edge technologies can enable us to stay on track. There are so many moving parts—from campuses being open or closed, to students keeping up with lesson plans, to parents having a voice in the entire process.
School leaders need the tools to support effective communications for board meetings, status updates, teacher evaluations, and preserving day-to-day business no matter where they are physically working.
Audio and video solutions can keep pace with an administrator's hectic day-to-day responsibilities, and they ensure the highest quality voice, video, and content sharing. Inside this comprehensive guide, we have compiled the best ways to enhance any learning environment—whatever the school year may bring.
Starin Town Hall Rewind—Higher Education
Meet Joe Way, Director of Learning Environments at University of Southern California and co-founder of HETMA. Joe has been in the Audiovisual field and at the forefront of Higher Education for the last 20 years. Joe is also an author and co-founder of the Higher Education Technology Managers Association (H.E.T.M.A). To kick off our Town Hall, we asked the question "What is HETMA?" HETMA stands for the Higher Education Technology Managers Alliance, a group of AV professionals who work in the Higher Education industry. As Joe stated, the group started as 10 steering committee members and recently opened leadership and general membership with over 700 Higher Education AV Technology Managers actively seeking a voice and influence with manufacturers, integrators, and campus administration. Thus far, they have hosted two virtual conferences as well as a handful of specific focus groups and webinars.
HETMA's mission is to be an advocacy organization focused on the Higher Education AV industry. The goal of HETMA is to raise awareness of technology issues unique to the Higher Education community by communicating with manufacturers, vendors, and Higher Education administrators on the needs and challenges that Technology Managers face. HETMA is also dedicated to providing educational and networking opportunities to their members to empower and grow their influence as an industry. From there our conversation turned to the role of the Technology Manager and how
Joe Way, PhD, Director of Learning Environments at University of Southern California
the role has evolved. Once thought of as "mailroom" or "telephone" people, the role of Technology Manager has become that of technical specialists with an acumen for customer service. Today's Technology Mangers are responsible not only for the technology, but for the integrator relationship and the shared Service Level Agreements. A big part of the Technology Manager's responsibility is to keep an eye out for the future, while understanding how educators are teaching and what tools they need. Prior to the pandemic sending everyone home, Joe had already started the process of designing and mocking up what the next generation of 200-300 student classrooms and Hyflex spaces look like. Behind the scenes, Joe was strengthening and upgrading their campus network as the foundation for new systems to come. As Joe mentioned "… the true convergence was not AV and IT, the convergence is AV and UC."
