Good Enough Classroom AV: Why Higher Ed Can’t Escape It

A professor once punched a hole through a classroom touch panel. He refused to wait 90 seconds for the projector to warm up. The integrator had to replace the entire $20,000 unit. AVNation founder Tim Albright shared the story on a recent episode of AVWeek. It captures a problem that has plagued higher education AV for decades. Technology that frustrates the person using it rarely survives contact with a classroom.

Classrooms today demand more than a projector and a screen. That used to be the standard for good enough. Hybrid learning pushed the bar higher, an SCN piece reported, citing AVIXA and Logitech research. Multi-camera coverage and real audio reinforcement now count as baseline expectations, not extras. The research found something striking, too. One in three faculty members has considered leaving a school over bad classroom technology. So has one in four students. Institutions that treat AV as an afterthought risk losing the people the technology is meant to serve.

Three guests joined a recent AVWeek round table to unpack one question. How does higher education move beyond good enough? Brock McGinnis of Nationwide AV, consultant Kelly Teal, and Cara Shannon of Crestron each brought a different vantage point. Together, their answers point to a shared conclusion. The fix is not more gear. It is a room that works the same way every time.

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The bar keeps rising, but budgets do not

Standardization matters as much as any single piece of gear, guests agreed. Support teams cannot scale without it. A touch panel that frustrates faculty defeats the purpose of the room. McGinnis does not expect higher education to escape the good enough mindset anytime soon.

Budget pressure keeps pulling money away from AV upgrades, he said. Cybersecurity and physical security have absorbed dollars once earmarked for classroom technology. Tuition cannot climb indefinitely to cover the difference. As a result, the schools doing this well are not chasing broadcast-quality distance learning.

“It doesn’t have to be great,” McGinnis said. “It just has to be clear and easy.”

McGinnis ties reliability to standards, not brands. “This system shall do this,” he said. “Press a button, microphone goes on, laptop connects to the display or the projector, and everything else requires no adjustment.”

That approach shifts responsibility onto the institution, not the integrator. McGinnis said the standard should describe performance, not a brand. Compatible gear across rooms lets support teams swap in a replacement fast when something breaks, he added. He also noted how much the landscape has changed. Educational institutions now carry far more in-house design expertise than they did 15 years ago, in his view. Integrators increasingly supply and service systems rather than design them from scratch.

Good enough is a budget word, not a satisfaction score

Kelly Teal, a consultant who advises higher education clients on AV investments, pushed back on the term itself. Good enough exists because budgets are tight, she said, not because users feel satisfied.

“Nobody walks out of a meeting saying, man, that mediocre audio experience was fantastic,” Teal said. “They just tolerate it.”

Teal measures success differently than a spec sheet does. The goal, she said, is a room nobody has to think about. Getting close to that goal starts well before installation, in her experience. Setting expectations with a client up front matters just as much as the design itself.

“Moving beyond good enough isn’t always about buying the most expensive equipment,” Teal said. “It’s about designing a room where nobody has to think about the technology.”

A five-minute struggle to share a screen counts as failure, in her view. So does audio that leaves remote participants straining to hear.

“If someone has to spend five minutes figuring out how to share their screen, or remote participants can’t hear people in the room, the technology has already failed,” Teal said.

Expectations shifted after COVID normalized hybrid meetings, Teal added. Remote workers no longer accept a diminished experience.

“I think people expect remote participants to feel like they’re actually in the room,” she said. “Not like they’re listening through a drive-through speaker.”

Manufacturers say the room comes before the box

Cara Shannon of Crestron builds on Teal’s point from the manufacturer’s side. Every deployment should start with the room’s actual use case, she said, not with a product catalog.

“The right solution is always going to start with understanding who’s in the room, who’s remote, how those people interact together, and what outcomes they’re trying to achieve,” Shannon said.

A single camera might suit a lecture hall built for one-way delivery, she explained. A hybrid, interactive classroom instead needs technology that lets remote students see and join the conversation. The gap between those two scenarios is where good enough tends to break down, according to Shannon.

“People don’t know what’s possible until they see it,” Shannon said. Manufacturers and integrators, in her view, need to show buyers the option, not just sell it to them. That means listening to how a room actually gets used before recommending anything.

“What’s key is making sure the technology disappears,” she said. “And it becomes about your workflow and how you utilize the space.”

Repeatable beats remarkable

All three guests circled back to the same idea. Consistency matters more than spectacle in a classroom. A room that works the same way every time builds trust with faculty. Meanwhile, a room that requires a manual does not.

For IT and AV teams building these systems, the takeaway is practical. A documented standard beats a wish list of features every time. Consistency also gives support staff a fighting chance when something breaks at 8 a.m. before a lecture.

Higher education will likely never escape budget constraints. Still, the panel agreed on one point. A clear standard, applied consistently, gets a room closer to good than any single upgrade could.

The research behind this conversation put a number on what happens otherwise. Faculty and students who fight with unreliable technology do not just complain. Some leave. That is a retention problem disguised as an AV problem. It belongs on the same budget spreadsheet as tuition and staffing.

None of the three guests argued for bigger budgets as the fix. They argued for discipline instead. Pick a standard, document it, and hold every room to it. Skip the feature that only works in one building. The technology should disappear entirely. That, ultimately, is the standard worth building toward.