What’s the Path to Purchase for Video on Campuses?

Who makes the buying decision, the final call, for a video platform at your school? Or, if you sell to education, who had the final say on your last few sales? Was that person a department director? 一个主要? 也许是院长，甚至是首席信息官?

The more I talk to educators across different institutions, 以及为他们服务的公司, the more I learn that there are a wide variety of answers. The effect of this variation is that both vendors and educators often do not know the most effective path for bringing video solutions to a campus.

尺寸绝对是一个因素. The bigger an institution, the more decentralized decision making can become. It’s not at all unusual for one department at a college to adopt a technology platform that’s not used elsewhere on campus. In some cases a smaller unit pursues a technology because of the specific needs of a particular discipline, such as statistical packages or software for scientific analysis. But in other cases the connection is less clearly connected to a particular field. When a department chair or technology director hears from her faculty that they need a collaboration platform or file server, she often does not have the luxury of waiting for a central campus office to complete a complex procurement process, 形成委员会, 做征求建议书.

Video definitely falls into this category, since any survey of its use in education will reveal use in just about every discipline, from the humanities and fine arts to engineering and business administration. While the adoption of campuswide video platforms is growing, when it comes to campus procurement priorities video has a lot of competition from other technologies, 比如人力百家乐软件系统, that administrators are more familiar with.

That does not mean educators who see the need for video solutions have as their only strategy lobbying central administrators, hoping they’ll recognize the value and demand. 大多数学校都不是自上而下的. Many campus technologies — from the web server to the learning management system — were developed or adopted first by innovative faculty, 学生, 和工作人员, taking root in their home departments before spreading. I have spoken to faculty 和工作人员 at schools of all sizes who helped evangelize for video technologies, leading to wider adoption at their institutions.

Individual faculty or IT staffers often find success by looking outside their own offices, building coalitions with colleagues in other divisions who share similar needs. I have been involved in these sorts of cooperative efforts, and I’ve observed that they lead to campuswide adoption.

Video platforms tend to benefit from network effects and scale; the more people use them at a school, the more valuable and desirable they become. When an architecture professor finds out that her colleague teaching English literature has his 学生 producing and submitting video essays, she is naturally inclined to ask her department to get her access. For a department chair or IT director, it is easier to buy into a platform already implemented elsewhere on campus, rather than having to start from scratch. 此外, joining an established effort usually cuts costs for all stakeholders, while often growing the contract with the vendor.

When campus technology and executive officers see a technology platform growing in use across their institution, 他们注意到了. Sometimes they recognize that the whole organization may save money if the service is centralized. 在其他情况下, the administration is forced to respond to the faculty and 学生 who don’t have access to the resources that their peers in other departments enjoy.

I think we can look forward to more central administrations purchasing and implementing video platforms on campus as educational video matures. 同时, the forward thinking innovators in departments, 单位, and schools are critical for pioneering new uses for video and introducing the next generation of platforms. There will continue to be many routes to adoption, and many decision makers. 但道路需要变得更加清晰.