Lessons Learned Deploying a Digital Classroom

Sami Rollins                     Kevin Almeroth
Department of Computer Science   Department of Computer Science
Mount Holyoke College            University of California
South Hadley, MA 01075           Santa Barbara, CA 93106-5110
srollins@mtholyoke.edu           almeroth@cs.ucsb.edu


A number of university campuses have undertaken the development of 
digital classrooms that enable presentation of digital media and 
digital lecture recording.  While educators from across disciplines 
are interested in using the facilities these classroom spaces 
provide, deploying the infrastructure for a digital classroom is 
difficult at best even for a technically savvy person.  As people 
from many disciplines become interested in building similar digital 
classroom spaces, there is a need to produce a useful set of design 
and implementation guidelines for determining the functionality of 
such a space and selecting and installing the equipment to achieve 
that functionality.  The goal of this paper is to report on the 
deployment of the UCSB digital classroom.  By using this paper as a 
guide, future digital classroom architects can reduce the project 
risk and steepness of the deployment curve.  This paper: 
(1) motivates the use of technology in the classroom by discussing 
the impact of technology on education; (2) presents a phased model 
for classroom deployment; and (3) categorizes the set of lessons 
we have learned during our deployment efforts.