The Four Corners of Classroom Support

Last month I attended the New Media Consortium annual conference in Monterey, California, and brought along an entry for the poster competition. I'm a new media sort of fellow, but sometimes paper and ink (even laser printer ink) is the way to go.

I'm happy to report that my entry, "The Four Corners of Classroom Support: A Multi-Part Approach to Classroom Technology at Tulane" won a Judges' Choice award. It looked darn nice, too!

The poster describes the Tulane approach to technology classroom support. In short, we break down support into four broad areas - Scheduled Maintenance, Rapid Response, Remote Monitoring, and Periodic Refresh - and then devise a plan that coordinates those separate efforts into a holistic strategy.

The Tulane Four-Corners approach is heavy on preventative maintenance, going so far as to even replace components based on predicted service life. Technology is not given the opportunity to fail. In the end, the effort is probably the same but service activiites are shifted from reactive to proactive - in other words, we generally work on our schedule, rather than have it dictated by the latest broken projector lamp or failed controller. Since we fully implemented the program, classroom service calls have dropped by nearly a third (very little actually breaks during a class period now) and only one projector lamp died in the middle of class during the entire year (compare to 12 during the previous period).

Still looking for the best way to post the PDF publicly from a hosted service. Slideshare will handle it but it mangles the fonts. Until I identify something better this will have to do: