Modern Classroom Design Happens With You or Without You. What’s Your Preference?

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Modern Classroom Design Happens With You or Without You. What’s Your Preference?

2/25/2004

By Terry Calhoun

Technology-enhanced classrooms often serve, for a chair of a department or the dean of a college within a larger university, much the same function as do state-of-the-art media unions for college and university presidents. A major though sometimes unstated mission for the project, one perhaps as important as its functionality, may be as a showcase for prospective students and faculty, or donors. There can be a lot of ego involvement.

In such cases, the involvement of IT management (or even academic leadership for that matter) may be an afterthought, something tacked on after major decisions have already been made. That's a serious mistake, but it's one that's repeated over and over on many campuses. You need to be ready, knowledgeable, connected, and ensure that decision makers and other stakeholders know that you expect and should be involved early on.

Your input is important to such projects. Will the planners and the architect think about staff support for the IT components, the necessary maintenance and upgrades, or the demands each of those might place on IT elsewhere on campus? Don't count on it.

The dean wants a showcase, the faculty will want space they are comfortable in and unafraid of, the architect will be greatly concerned with aesthetics, and so on. Good planning will include all potential stakeholders early on, but good planning d'esn't always happen. In fact, it's less common than you might think and you have a professional responsibility to make your part happen.

Here are some things to think about. Even if you just think about them, you'll be more ahead of the game. If you implement some of them, maybe you already do, you'll save yourself some headaches. You almost assuredly will save your institution some money, and probably contribute to the success of its educational mission as well.

Get in early. Figure out how be involved in the very most preliminary planning for such projects, including helping to write the Request for Proposals (RFP) or Request for Qualifications (RFQ) and the later stages of architect/designer selection. Nobody's going to actually let you make those decisions, but you can be a voice for the inclusion of appropriate technical requirements.

Don't wait to be invited. It really is not enough to wait until you are invited. Physical facility planners take their planning seriously. Amazing amounts of details are foreseen and designed very early in planning processes. By the time you learn of a project, all sorts of decisions that may have to be rethought are likely to have already taken place. Even if things aren't so far along that conduits have to be rerouted or panels torn out, changes cost money, partly because changes mean work for designers and architects.

Have a plan. That d'esn't mean that you have to foresee every new building or renovation and its IT needs. However, a good information technology plan will, among other things, propose procedures for inclusion of IT staff in physical facility infrastructure planning. The plan can, in a very passive way, act as a watchdog, setting off an alarm when someone involved in a new project who knows of its existence realizes that they need to be in touch with you.