On Higher Ed Tech: EPOS

AVT Question: Please share insight and best practices for designing the higher ed classroom for today and the future.

Thought Leader: Jennifer Orzechowski, Director, Marketing, Americas at EPOS

The success of online learning has three critical technology elements—video, audio, and content sharing. While video and content have played a pivotal role in ensuring the teacher-student connection, the power of high-quality audio has often been overlooked.

Be it audio delays from bad internet connectivity or multiple participants speaking at the same time or background noises coming from each participant’s location, audio challenges can have a negative impact on health by increasing stress levels. Learning in the classroom, physical or virtual, in the presence of noise is more difficult than ever. Students learning from their homes or dorm rooms with noisy backgrounds or in cafés or classrooms with surrounding chitchat, struggle to concentrate and get tired easily. The result—students lose their focus, motivation, and cognitive processing.

Remote learning requires creating a compelling, engaging, and inclusive environment. The need for better connectivity and robust audio, and video devices to enable seamless teaching and learning has never been greater.

The choice of professional headsets continues to increase, expanding the array of offerings that best fit the changing needs of educators and students. A wide array of solutions, that allow for clear, crisp audio by varying personas, are providing educators and students with more choices. Regardless of where and when learning takes place, today’s Active noise-canceling (ANC) headsets tune out background noise to offer clear audio and a distraction-free experience.

As students and teachers grapple with multiple devices and technologies for remote learning across smartphones, tablets, computers, and software they look for simple, easy-to-deploy and use headsets that intelligently pair with multiple communication solutions.