Technology has an unnerving habit of letting you down at the most critical moment. Equipment that worked perfectly well in rehearsals suddenly breaks down just at the time when it can cause the greatest embarrassment to you and your students. As classrooms become more equipped with electronic equipment the chance increases of something going wrong. Starting from the belief that technology universities should know something about educational technology, I asked the AV departments in the five Australian Technology Network (ATN) universities what they recommend lecturers do when equipment fails in the classroom.
Call for help
The commonly advertised strategy for dealing with equipment not working in the classroom is to call the AV department for help. Most ATN universities have a telephone or intercom system in their main lecture theatres with which staff can contact the help service and talk through any problem that might arise during a lecture. The key is not to go too far into trying to solve the problem yourself before you call for assistance. Far better for the technical support to be called out on a false alarm than to run out of time for your class through spending all your time on getting the technology working. Find out who is responsible for the room you are in and what the expected response time for help is likely to be. There may be only one person on-call for the whole university and it will take some time for the AV technicians to come and fix the fault so you should have an activity like revising last weeks class in reserve to fill the gap.
Prepare before hand
To minimise problems in teaching spaces ATN universities have attempted to standardise the equipment provided in each classroom. QUT provides an operating manual for all audio-visual equipment used in its teaching spaces which Gordon Howell recommends lecturers read before using lecture theatres. Teaching spaces across the University are grouped into different categories that indicate the type of audiovisual equipment available for use in the space so lecturers can be confident that what they learn about one kind of equipment applies in different rooms. A common problem occurs when lecturers do not anticipate the delay caused by equipment warming up. In this case, continually switching between equipment can extend the warm up period or mix up the signals being sent to controller circuits. Keep the instructions to the controller simple. Go through the start-up sequence one step at a time and give the computer time to do the things it needs to do. If everything freezes it is most unlikely that it is because you have broken the system. When in doubt, switch everything off and start again.
Read the user manual
Technology is continually being upgraded bringing a wide range of equipment models and formats into the classroom. This means lecturers need to know more about the equipment they plan to use before they bring it into the classroom. For example, many models of overhead projectors have a second bulb which can be used when a lamp blows, some which simply slide into place while others need the machine opened to be changed. Morris Ewings from UniSA says that a major issue he faces when laptops are brought into a classroom is that a laptop can only project an image through its external VGA port after the port has first be made active. All laptops have a simple way of doing this but each model will have a slightly different combination depending on the operating system and keyboard. The only solution for resolving the problem of greater variety of equipment is having a better knowledge of the unique settings for your particular model. Have the equipment’s user manual on hand and familiarise yourself with its trouble-shooting guide that is usually printed in the back of most technical manuals.
Check the cables
A lot more people are bringing their own equipment into the classroom which require their own adaptors to connect to the university’s AV equipment. For example, power adaptors are likely to be purpose built for a devise and it is unlikely that a spare can be found on short notice. Morris Ewings says that after several years of experience he has seen people try to fit cables into many places they shouldn’t go resulting in other problems like bent or snapped pins on the cable and possibly pins snapped off in the port which can be rather expensive to get fixed. It is good to do a quick check of the pins on the cable before using it. If the pins are bent, do not bend them back, get a new cable. Bending them can result in connection issues so you might end up seeing only the green or red in the image. Check that all connections are made firmly. Cables in classrooms are continually pushed in and out of connectors, which tend to loosen over time, making them easier to slip out and give a poor connection.
Check the inputs
Most AV consoles allow for multiple inputs and will have some means by which the different inputs are mixed together. At RMIT a common mistake they have found with complex mixing systems is not setting the input to the device intended. For example, a VCR and a DVD might be labelled Video 1 and Video 2 on the remote control and without clear labelling it is necessary to have the video playing in order to check that the correct device has been selected. As well as checking a microphone input on the sound mixer it is important to position a radio microphone and lectern microphone to avoid the annoying squeals of feedback. If you’re showing video from a laptop the sound is likely to require its own cable that goes into an auxiliary sound input which needs to be selected during playback.
Check software compatibility
Kathy Gratten at UTS has found that the large number of different versions of software needed to run AV equipment has made software compatibility an issue. The only real solution for software incompatibility is to go into the class early and test that the software will work in the room in which you are going to use your equipment. It is not possible to assume that every computer will be set up with all the codecs you’re using on your office or home computer or that it will be possible to upgrade software before the class. Two common problems of compatibility are reference files that are linked to a particular hard drive that can’t be found on the classroom computer. Also when using Powerpoint you can’t assume that fonts you used in the design of the presentation are also installed on the classroom computer. Even links to the web need to be tested as some universities limit access to some sites, especially in YouTube.
