What differentiates Texas A&M University’s Zachry Engineering Education Complex (ZEEC) from traditional classrooms is obvious not just in its technology worktables with wireless connectivity and multi-device sharing screens, tech-powered interdisciplinary laboratories or the open architecture that make the 525,000-square-foot space.
It is also the fact that the ZEEC will be one of the largest active learning spaces in the country with 18, 100-person active learning studios and 14, 50-person learning studios. The ZEEC is hardly a typical learning environment, it’s a striking example of a future-proof approach to education that could eventually make traditional methods as outdated as chalk and blackboards.
Wait a minute, you may ask. When classroom technologies are constantly evolving as we know it, how could a tech-driven classroom environment be future-proof, or unlikely to become obsolete?
This was exactly the question that administrators and faculty grappled with as they searched for solutions that could help them design a classroom that can continue to evolve with new technologies. In other words, the school wanted future-proof technology that would power its active learning spaces with the cutting edge collaboration tools.
During this process, the university quickly realized that overhauling a campus by relying on hardware-based solutions was not efficient.
First of all, for large organizations like Texas A&M University, installing new infrastructure hardware for classroom is costly. Plus we’re now in an era where cloud-based and virtualized IT infrastructure solutions are on the rise and hardware-based solutions are becoming obsolete in favor of more flexible and scalable solutions.
That’s why Texas A&M University partnered with us to deliver a software-based solution that can constantly evolve, change direction and iterate improvements in a speedy manner that would truly make their classroom future-proof.
As an organization, our mission has been to simplify the complex and create solutions that don’t replace existing workflows, but rather support and streamline them.
You can learn more about our partnership with Texas A&M University here.
Are you interested in future-proofing your classroom? If your classrooms rely on hardware-based solutions, here are some questions you should consider asking yourself:
- Do I need to replace all of my existing hardware equipment to upgrade or modify its capabilities?
- Is it expensive and difficult for me to upgrade my classroom’s hardware?
- Have I not kept up with the latest classroom technology because of how costly it is to replace my current equipment?
- Do I need to buy additional equipment to have my current equipment support other wireless devices?
If you’ve answered yes to any of the questions above, then you should check out our next blog post on the pitfalls of a hardware-based classroom technology solution and how to solve them.
To learn more, join us on our next ThinkHub Connect webinar on July 26th. Click here to see our full webinar schedule.