A classroom renovation has four owners, and naming them up front is most of what keeps the project on track.
Facilities owns the physical infrastructure. Electrical, network cabling, acoustic treatment, furniture, the ceiling itself. They think in construction schedules and capital budgets.
IT owns the connection to institutional systems. The network, identity and access, the LMS, room scheduling, security. They think in standards and support load.
The AV integrator owns the room technology. Displays, cameras, microphones, the control system, and the wiring tying it together. They work from whatever specification they are handed.
Academic affairs owns the actual reason the room exists: the teaching. They think in courses, faculty, and student experience.
Every one of these roles is legitimate, and every one is bounded. Projects go well when all four are working from the same understanding. And when academic affairs stays in the room through the middle of the project, not just the kickoff and the ribbon-cutting.
Where an academic voice matters
Some choices in a room project are hard to get right from a specification alone, because they hinge on how the space will really be taught.
Camera behavior. A fixed camera suits a podium lecture; an auto-tracking camera suits a discussion class, which one a room needs depends on what is scheduled into it.
Control-system layout. How many buttons, what the resting state is, how quickly a substitute can get the room running. The people who know how much attention an instructor has left at the start of class are in the teaching center and on the faculty.
Capture defaults. Whether recording is automatic or opt-in, and where it publishes, determines whether it happens at all and whether students ever find it. That is a teaching-workflow question, not a technical one.
The go-live date. A room that comes online during a low-enrollment term, giving faculty time to get comfortable before the full course load hits, starts on solid footing. Academic affairs knows the calendar’s quiet stretches; facilities knows the construction schedule; the two need to meet.
Which rooms get funded first. When capital is limited, deciding which spaces to do well is as much an academic-priority call as a facilities one.
How institutions keep the academic voice in
A few patterns show up again and again in projects that land well.
Name one academic owner accountable for whether the finished rooms serve teaching. Someone with real standing to raise a concern about a design decision and have it taken seriously, not a representative who shows up to the kickoff and disappears.
Put a faculty member who teaches in that room type on the design review. Their job is not to approve the budget. It is to answer, decision by decision, whether it is taking a step away from teaching or adding one.
Review the design at the configuration stage, not just the concept stage. The concept drawing usually looks fine on paper. The details that decide the outcome. How the control system gets programmed, where the microphones end up, what the room’s resting state is. Get settled later, and that is when a second look pays off most.
Treat the handoff itself as part of the project. A room is genuinely ready when a faculty member can be handed it on day one of the term without a walkthrough and an apology attached. A short acceptance step. A few instructors running a mock session in the finished room before it goes live. Catches what a punch list misses.
Why the coordination is worth the effort
When all four teams are aligned, the room reflects all four: it is built well, it connects properly to institutional systems, the technology holds up, and it serves the teaching. When one perspective goes thin during the design decisions, the room ends up strong on that one dimension and weaker everywhere else. This is not a new committee or a slower process. It is keeping the right people in the room for the decisions that shape how the space gets used for the next decade.
References
- AVIXA. (2021). Audiovisual Information Technology (AV/IT) Infrastructure Guidelines for Higher Education. https://www.avixa.org/docs/default-source/default-document-library/avit-higher-ed-guidelines-2021.pdf
- AVIXA. Audiovisual Systems Performance Verification, ANSI/AVIXA D402.02:2013 (R2024). https://www.avixa.org/standards/audiovisual-systems-performance-verification
- EDUCAUSE. Horizon Report: Teaching and Learning Edition (annual). https://www.educause.edu/horizon-report
Jack Wrightmann is a consultant at Wrightmann Education Technologists. Part of the The Connected Classroom series.