January 8, 2009
Mary Gates Hall getting tech upgrade, thanks to Gates family
While students were taking a break over the holidays, the employees of Classroom Support Services’ Information Technology Group were hard at work beginning what will be a transformation of 14 classrooms in Mary Gates Hall. When they finish at the end of summer, all those rooms will be equipped for state-of-the-art screencasting, and five of them will also support videoconferencing.
The work is made possible by an endowment set up by the Gates family when the building reopened after a remodel in 1998. The Mary Gates classrooms were considered the most technologically advanced on campus back then, but 10 years is an eternity in the world of technology, so the endowment is there to finance regular upgrades.
Spearheading the work are Eric Barnum, an A/V engineer, and Tim Batzel, a senior computer specialist. Barnum is the project manager and lead designer for the project, while Batzel will be doing the majority of the programming for the rooms’ control systems. David Aldrich, the IT group’s manager, is drawing on his design and fabrication background to manufacture all the custom parts for the project. Bradley Bell, the programmer who developed Classroom Support Services’ screencasting application, is focusing on the lighting control systems.
What is screencasting? It’s the next step up from podcasting. The rooms are set up with a camera, a digital frame grabber and a microphone to capture the professor’s lecture and presentation materials as he or she talks. The camera image, audio track and any PowerPoint slides or other visual displays the professor is using are combined into a presentation that can be viewed online. (All rooms will have a desktop computer and also support laptops that are brought in.) Students can then go to a Web site and review each lecture, or catch up on missed classes. The majority of the screen they’ll see shows the PowerPoint or other visual display, while a small box in the corner shows the professor, and his or her voice is heard through the speakers.
The IT group has pulled more than 7,500 feet of audio, video and control system cable for the upgrade project so far. “What we’re doing is replacing the control system in the rooms and then upgrading the equipment itself,” Barnum said. “We’re effectively changing from older formats and older equipment that is aging because the rooms have been used for 10 years.”
The insides of the podiums and the equipment racks in the rooms are being modified to support VCRs, DVD players and Blu-ray players (Mary Gates will be the only building with Blu-ray players). The current touch panels are being replaced with advanced control and automation systems to operate all the audio and video equipment, lights and speakers throughout the classrooms. These advanced control systems allow Classroom Support Services staff to remotely shut down data projectors that have been left on. Doing so greatly extends the life of expensive projection lamps used in many classrooms on campus.
“The first three rooms we did (254, 284 and 288) have podiums and have space for a touch screen but the touch screen was never installed,” Batzel said. “They had a remote control tethered to the podium that had to be aimed at the projector to turn it on. So these rooms benefit dramatically from this project.”
Other rooms on the list (228, 238, 234, 241, 242, 251, 287, 295, 231 and 271) had touch screen displays but did not have all the components that are included in the upgrade. They will also have their touch screens upgraded.
Work on the first three rooms was completed over the quarter break, as was work on 242, 287 and 295. The rest of the rooms will be finished during winter quarter on a rolling schedule; one room will always be out of service while it’s being worked on.
In spring quarter Barnum and Batzel expect to move on to the first four rooms scheduled for videoconferencing as well as screencasting, 231, 241, 251 and 271. In a room designed for videoconferencing, there is a device that turns the audio and video at the site from live analog to digital packets that are sent over the Internet, then converts digital signals from the other site back into audio and video. The result is that people gathered in the Mary Gates rooms will be able to see and hear people at a remote site through large, wall mounted monitors. If a laptop or in-room computer is connected to the videoconferencing device, it’s also possible to send PowerPoint presentations or other visual displays to the remote site.
The University already has nine videoconferencing rooms in other buildings, and the demand for them is growing, according to Patrick Roberts, associate director of Classroom Support Services. “It’s just so convenient,” he said. “We had a fisheries class that wanted to bring in a guest lecturer from Friday Harbor Labs. Well, normally, that guy would have to get on the ferry, drive down here, give an hour’s lecture and answer questions, then drive back and get on the ferry again. It would take up his whole day. But with videoconferencing, he was able to stay where he was and talk to the students, who had the same rich educational experience as if he had come.”
The use of videoconferencing goes further than the occasional guest lecture. Classroom Support Services staff, for example, use it to meet regularly with their counterparts at UC Berkeley to talk about technology. Graduate students have used it for their final oral exams when one of their committee members is not local. And ASUW committee members have used it to attend meetings when they are studying abroad.
One of the more complex uses of the system is an anthropology class that is team-taught by one professor at the UW and another at WSU. The professors have different areas of expertise, so by joining forces they can give the students a broader experience. They also bring in guest lecturers from both universities to make the class even richer.
“In these economic times, when travel becomes difficult, it really makes sense to go this route,” Roberts said.
One of the goals for the project is to make both screencasting and videoconferencing as simple as possible. Screencasting of a class is scheduled in advance and happens without the instructor having to do anything; videoconferencing will be “as easy as dialing a phone number for the remote site and hitting connect,” Batzel said.
The videoconferencing rooms should be finished by the end of spring quarter, and the summer will be spent working on 389, the auditorium in Mary Gates. It will be equipped for screencasting and videoconferencing, but it will also have a wide screen, HD projection surround sound system.
“In addition to classroom space it will also be a really nice rental space,” Barnum said. “It will be the most flexible room we have in terms of the feature sets it offers.”
Barnum and Batzel say they’ve found the project to be fun and interesting. Both are former student employees of Classroom Support Services who started out running audiovisual equipment for instructors. And that’s given them a good base from which to do their work.
“We have the experience of working with the professors and we can design a room based around what the University’s needs are and not necessarily the cookie cutter A/V room that a contracting company might come in and do,” Batzel said.
“Projects like this are often outsourced to A/V design and integration companies who charge a lot of money for their services,” Aldrich said. “I am fortunate to have very talented people working in my group. They bring a lot of creativity and know-how to the table, and this allows us to do all the design and integration work in-house. There is a huge cost savings for the UW when we can operate this way.”
“It’s been a great collaborative project,” Roberts said. “I said to them, ‘Let’s see if we can do this’ and they just took it and ran with it.”
