Hi All,
Back to publishing here, and we’ve got some interesting tidbits from BETT 2011. I wasn’t expecting much from the show, so rather than lose time on projects I need to finish, I sauntered up on a Saturday for a look. I was in for a bit of a surprise. Last year, I was just getting started in the job. This year, a lot of my main goals have been accomplished – the VLE review is complete, the recording classroom is built (if not fully out of pilot just yet) and I’ve learned a lot.
There are still major issues though, including how much value we get for money on these projects, and can we do more for less? I’m really pleased to say the answer is “easily, yes”
Some highlights then. 
Telepresence: I’ve been looking into ways to connect our three campuses, and the cost associated with it is just astonishing. Its hypercar money. Obviously that isn’t going to happen in the current climate. So in steps Avermedia with this little number:
this is a H300 conferencing unit. You can get a H100 as well, but the 300 allows you to connect up to four sites at once. Its HD, records the session if you want, and is dead simple to initiate calls with. In essence its a sub £2k multi site conferencing solution with all the bells and whistles built in. I tried it out at BETT and we called up a camera set up at the Gherkin. Quality was excellent, even over a busy connection. Standards compliant, open, and can call anything. Its a show stopper. If the camera can be plugged into an Echo 360 unit, then life is good. We’ll see on that one.
Desks: As part of the learning-enhanced classroom project, I had a custom desk installed in a classroom and the equipment embedded into it. I didn’t have much choice according to my reseller, and I can’t say the final product
grabbed me. See left. Meh. It was remarkably expensive, overdue and I couldn’t vet it beforehand to make sure it suited. What I saw at delivery was what I got.
So what I found when I got to BETT was surprising: fully prepped lecterns! They’re done by an outfit called TOP-TEC. I was duly impressed at the embedded monitor arm, Crestron device point, and electronic switch for raising or lowering th
e unit (sit, stand – its all good). Better yet, they’ll laser engrave your college’s logo and light it accurately with led lighting. All good. Shame it costs a fortune right? Thats the kicker. It costs half what I paid a cabinet maker to do it for. They even showed me a price list on the spot and guaranteed 4 week delivery. You can slot a PC, an echo 360 unit and a conferencing unit in. If you want, you can have up to twelve 1u slots. All in a very attractive desk package. Did I mention you could choose your colour scheme from a variety pack? I can’t possibly imagine why I’d go through the pain of building another wooden, ergonomically suspect desk again.
Crestron touchpad controls: So not bad really, but the goal was to figure out telepresence, and reducing the cost of lecture recording classrooms by at least half. So onto the Crestron booth. The guys there were chatty and friendly, and they got the idea that I didn’t necessarily want a £2k unit for every single classroom. So they showed me the £300 one.
Its just like the £2k one – except it controls only 4 devices. I only have four devices in the current room! Thats not a faceplate in the pic to the left – its the full alternative to the 1u racked unit. Ethernet and control chips are embedded in the back. Seems that I was given the most expensive option first time around. Funny that. These are the entry level items – embedded controller and easy to mount. Push button interface if you want to switch between devices. However we have something more – a fully customised control program that we desig
ned in house. Will it work on this device? Oh yes it will! Works exactly the same – you just copy on the firmware and go. Which means you can also the graphical interface. This cost a 
pretty penny last time, but go figure – there’s a cheaper option there too. On the right you see the £700 graphic controller. push buttons are optional – I tend to remove them to keep things simple.
So what does this mean? We can now eliminate the remotes for the conferencing system. This means that you enter a room with one of these desks, touch the screen to star, and we add a button called “conference call” to the current selection. You then pick from pre-set locations and it automatically calls. You can zoom, hold, or conference in others – no need for a remote. Conferencing becomes dead easy.
So potentially we have professional, Guildford College branded teaching desks, with built in telepresence in some cases, lecture recording in others, and all containing a PC, DVD player and various bits safely locked in a height adjustable desk. All controlled through a simple touch pad on the top of the desk. Sounds terribly expensive right?
Some back of the napkin math drove it home for me. I could get the desk, the control system, and a telepresence/recording system. And I could do it for under £6k. Thats more than 2/3 cheaper than before. I’m astonished. To be fair, I’ve learned enough from the pilot project to know what to avoid, who to talk to and how to move the process along, but that’s why you do pilots.
So what did I get our of BETT? Well, we’ve found an inexpensive telepresence solution, a common means of cheaply eliminating remotes via our now-mature touchscreen software, and the ability to do a cutting edge learning-enhanced classroom for less than half of what we used to pay. Not a bad day out really.
All a bit technical in terms of chat, but there are learning objectives here that often get overlooked. The object is to have a simple, intuitive, and consistent user experience. Teachers don’t want to wrestle with equipment – they want to have a experience that frees them to teach, and teach well. The equipment should fade into the background. Hopefully, the tech we’ve found at BETT will let us do just that.
