Our First–Ever Smart Classrooms Survey

Thank you to all who responded!

Toward the end of the Fall, 2010 semester, we invited all of the instructors presently teaching in Academic Technology Smart Classrooms to participate in a surveys about the technology in those classrooms and how they use that technology. Happily, we have received over one hundred responses. We have had the opportunity to study these responses and have found them very helpful in deciding the future course of upgrades to our Smart Classrooms. As we read and study the responses we find that the Smart Classrooms will be a work in progress, but we can quickly respond to the survey with the following:

We can help! While reading through the survey results, we realized that many of the problems that respondents wrote about can be easily solved. If you have a problem that is not yet addressed to your satisfaction, please get in contact with us. We are here to help you make the technology work for you and your class. Give us call or email. Our quick help line is 312-369-7550 and all of our contact information is available by clicking here .

Are you in an ATF Smart Room? From the responses we could tell that many are not sure if they are, or are clearly not, in an ATF Smart Classroom. Many asked non-ATF technicians for help. If you are in an ATF Smart Classroom, our Help number, 312-369-7550, will be posted on the Podium. The complete list of the Academic Technology Smart Classrooms is here. If you have any problems with the technology in any of the ATF Smart Rooms, please call 312-369-7550 or any of the contact numbers listed on our Main Page, here . If we are not informed about technical problems, we cannot solve them. While we appreciate the temporary assistance of the technicians from other departments, we cannot expect them to follow up on the problems they encounter and only ATF technicians have full access to the technology and can fix the problem thoroughly. All other Smart Classrooms are usually managed by the department that schedules classes in that room. Please contact them for help in their rooms.

Macs are on the way. The request for Macintosh computers in Smart Classrooms was much larger than we thought. As the rooms are updated on the normal upgrade schedule, the PCs will be replaced by dual-booting iMacs, which will run either OSX or Windows.

Streaming media, Netflix, etc. There have been many requests to stream media in the Smart Classrooms using Netflix and other services. There are currently copyright issues surrounding these services and we are looking for the best resolution. Any news will be posted as it becomes available.

ATF Training sessions. The majority of respondents to our survey have not had the opportunity to attend any training on the operation of the technology in our Smart Classrooms. To help with this problem we will continue to invite faculty teaching in the Smart Rooms to our quick 15-minute sessions in the Smart Classrooms at the beginning of each semester. The schedule will be emailed to all instructors teaching in our rooms and will also be posted on our Smart Classroom page, here.

We invite you to see all the survey results here.