Upgrading Classrooms

I think I may just put a dedicated computer in each classroom that is hardwired and require the professors to either save their information on the network or bring in USB sticks.

that seems more solid to me

Any ideas on recording lectures and streaming them automatically?

sotty i cannot help with that part - ask a mod to add topics to your Q or more experts

Are the teachers expected to take questions from those watching the broadcast session?

I think eventually it should be interactive to the point of questions being able to be asked remotely on the class sessions.

We won't use Chrome books, though, so that should lessen costs. I will check out smarttech.com.

There are four classrooms.  The classrooms have the bandwidth to accomplish this, I am sure.  The connection that these would exist on have a total of 40 other desktop/laptop computers on it.  Students exist on a separate connection.  

It is a non-profit institution that does not have a line-item for this project, so my problem currently is figuring out what money needs to be raised to accomplish the project.  One company that I have contacted will only come on-site to discuss what I need once I have the money in place.  However, they won't even tell me what they plan on putting in my classrooms and I need an actual quote from a company to go back to the president and say "this is how much it will cost per classroom".  Therefore, it has involved me, more, trying to figure out what I should be looking at to even know what direction I should go.

GoToMeeting would be good, but I don't know how that would work on an ongoing basis.  

Panopto is a software that I looked at and it offered the ability, I believe, to schedule the class sessions to automatically record, but it is $11,000 a year, something that I don't anticipate the school budgeting for every year.

aburr,

Thank you for the insights.  


When I have approached the president he sums it up with car models: cheapest way to do it, midsized, and Cadillac.  I am just glad that there are people out there like you that give me questions to ponder or ask others about to get a better idea of what we are even trying to do.  The problem is, I have no idea what the Cadillac would be and what the cheapest would be either.  I would almost assume that the cheapest would be to just record the lectures without any interactivity, and the Cadillac would be something close to full integration where the classroom could be completely interactive and it would be a remote presentation to another location also.

I am coming from a point where I need to determine costs. When I say "cheap" I am not talking cheap equipment, but rather just what meets the requirement from the president as outlined above, whereas "Cadillac" would mean something that accomplishes that goal but also goes way above and anticipates what the future could bring (in the above example that would mean running additional cables anticipating future need, whereas cheap would mean just running the necessary cables right now.)

There are a total of forty computers that utilize the network presently that the teachers are using, which includes their current equipment. There is already wireless in the classrooms for students.

This is a seminary, so this is Masters-level education. The broad statement that I delivered at the beginning is the only direction that I have on this project. I am a one-man IT department, so there is no one else. I am not entirely sure that we are trying to integrate any kind of software as much as just making it easier for the professors to teach their classes without worrying about if their computer is going to show the content that they want it to.

Why WiFi?  How are they currently connected to the internet?

I will negate the internet question by just placing desktops in the classrooms that will allow the professors to utilize one machine that will always be connected.  As far as younger teachers to usher in the technology, the youngest professor here is 45 with the oldest being 67.  They don't utilize any sort of software interactivity in the classrooms, so the projectors in the room are used to display pdfs, documents, and Biblical texts.

Wow, that seems very helpful.

Alright, clickers may be something that we should look at.  Thanks for the suggestion.

the experts had lots of suggestion considering the info they had