Most community colleges do not have a video technology problem. Instead, community colleges typically have a plan and scale problem.
A community college may first invest in video to support nursing simulation, then discover additional video technology needs in counseling, criminal justice, allied health, or other campus programs.
Each technology purchase likely solved an immediate departmental problem, but over time, the separate systems contributed to a growing struggle: multiple video systems management, workflows, and support requirements.
Avoiding this common challenge requires a different approach: changing how video technology is planned, purchased, and deployed in the first place.
Community college programs often reach a tipping point when several departments begin using video technology independently. As AV technology systems accumulate, IT is left supporting multiple platforms with separate workflows, storage requirements, and often, differing support needs.
A department-level approach to video technology can work at first. Over time, though, separate systems multiply the support, training, and equipment that a campus IT program must support.
Plan video technology across the campus, not one department at a time.
Department-driven purchasing is a common higher education challenge, not just because piecemeal technology purchases can increase complexity, but they can also increase costs in the long run.
Planning a Multi-Program Rollout?
Get the full framework for sequencing programs, setting standards, and aligning funding before you expand beyond one lab.
Another cost driver? Standard off-the-shelf technology that isn’t designed for how learning happens at community colleges, and here’s why.
Community college coursework prepares students for highly practical work. Faculty need technology that fits the way students learn and demonstrate skills.
A standard, straightforward lecture recording setup may be useful in a classroom, but it may not meet the needs of a simulation lab, clinical training room, interview space, or skills assessment. In addition, for effective teaching and learning, faculty may need additional functionality such as:
Choosing a standard system before defining the teaching and learning requirements can leave instructors working around the technology instead of effectively integrating it.
IVS recommends defining the technology application first, including required capabilities, user groups, and plans for future growth. This process should include input from program leaders, faculty, administration, and critically, the campus IT department.
Community college IT teams already carry broad responsibilities. Adding several unrelated video platforms across campus creates an additional layer of responsibility, from hardware and software management to training, security and compliance issues that must be addressed.
A repeatable platform gives IT one environment to manage while allowing individual programs to use video technology differently. Southeast Community College https://www.ipivs.com/ivs-case-studies/enhancing-healthcare-education-at-southeast-community-college-with-valt, for example, uses a single VALT video platform across its health science programs, allowing each department to support its own training needs within one shared environment.
Centralized video capture technology can reduce the technology management burden caused by disparate video technology systems on campus.
IVS recommends looking beyond individual department needs to identify how a shared video platform will support multiple programs, eliminating the IT management of separate systems.
The purchase price is only one part of a video technology acquisition decision. Community colleges must also consider the costs of:
Student recordings can also create privacy and security requirements that must be addressed before video use is integrated on campus.
An educational video technology platform should provide appropriate and manageable access controls.
Campus programs handling sensitive content may also need to comply with FERPA, HIPAA or other institutional requirements, regardless of the video technology system used.
IVS recommends addressing security and support questions at technology integration onset, not after departments have integrated separate video systems.
While a community college rarely needs to deploy a video technology system everywhere at once, it does need to know whether the system selected today can support subsequent use cases.
To minimize future technology struggles, identify the immediate technological need, but then envision how technology could be integrated next year, five years, even 10 years down the road. Ask questions like:
Campus video technology integration works best when the first deployment becomes a foundation rather than a standalone project.
Based on our customer experiences, a planning approach that blends present requirements with longer-term growth expectations can help avoid the common pitfalls that community colleges often face when deploying video technology.
Planning across programs can make the difference between a system that is actively used in student learning and supports learning outcomes and a system that simply gets installed. Our Effective Use of Audio/Video Capture in Higher Education playbook is a great resource to check out if you’re starting this process.
What type of video technology platform would work best with your identified instructional needs?
Learn about how Mount Royal University (MRU) successfully integrated VALT into its child development and nursing simulation labs in our case study.
Ready to Scale Video Observation Campus-Wide?
Download the Community College Planning Guide for a step-by-step framework on programs, funding, and phased deployment.