CCUMC: The Consortium of College and University Media Centers

by
Dickran Parunak
Information Technology
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, NC

Note:  Dickran Parunak was supposed to present at the fall 2007 conference but was not able to attend.  He generously agreed to provide the following information based, at least in part, on his presentation materials.

Audiovisual technology is a utility in learning spaces on higher education campuses all across the country.  To say it’s as commonplace as a light switch would be an understatement.  In many cases, it is the light switch.  The line between what is and isn’t AV is becoming more and more blurry every day.  One of the problems is how do we take care of it all?  We KNOW how to do it.  But in most cases, we don’t have the means to make it happen.  Many of us squeak by year to year doing our best but knowing that if we had a few more resources we could do so much better.  And if teaching and learning with technology in the classroom is a critical component of higher education, we can’t afford not to support it.

We ask ourselves:  how can we…

• Prevent more problems for instructors?
• Decrease response times when instructors call?
• Provide enough staff to cover all the courses being taught?
• Keep spares on hand for hot swaps?
• Hire and/or train skilled employees and retain them?
• Pay for insurance so equipment can be replaced if it is stolen or damaged?
• Provide up to date equipment in our learning spaces as technology changes?

The list could go on and on.  And I’m sure each campus has its own environment that has its own set of unique questions and nuances.  There isn’t one answer for every campus, but there are three categories that are central to most any unit involved in supporting learning space technology:  labor, maintenance, and lifecycles.

Labor is probably the most difficult to get your hands around.  However, we can’t do this without people.  So let’s take care of the most critical piece first. 

1. Determine how many standard technology configurations you have.  Hopefully, they aren’t all different.
2. Count the number of learning spaces of each type.
3. Make a list of the different tasks your technicians perform for each type of space.  (E.g. roomchecks, filter cleanings, help desk, training, technical repairs).  You may decide to make these very general or very specific.  That’s up to you and how much time you want to devote to this work.
4. Identify on a per classroom basis how many staff hours should be allocated per week for each task.  You may want to average it out on monthly basis.   Don’t forget to include travel time and time for documentation.
5. If you have different levels of technicians, you will want to separate the tasks for each level of technician. 
6. Then, given the hourly pay rate for each level of technician, you should be able to calculate your total annual labor costs for each type of room with a little multiplication and addition.

That’s labor.  How about maintenance?  That may be the next logical step, but we really need to calculate something else before we go there.  To know how much it costs to maintain a room, we need to know what’s in it.  So take the equipment list of EVERYTHING….literally everything that you support in each type of space and determine the total cost.  Don’t leave out anything, not a cable, not a screw, not a connector.  If a connector breaks, you have to buy another one.  Installation and programming costs are important as well.  It costs something to install them and it’s going to cost something to replace them when they break.

Once you have the total cost for each type, you can start thinking about maintenance costs. What percent of the equipment do you expect to fail?  If things are under warranty, I use 1%.  If they aren’t, that number jumps to 50%.  How much equipment are you insuring?  What is your insurance rate?  How many lamps do you expect to put into projectors per year?  How much do your phone lines in the classrooms cost you?  What about batteries or other consumables? How much are they going to cost you over the course of a year?  Remember, these costs may differ for each type. You may have other maintenance costs.  Include them all.

Lastly we have lifecycle.  If you don’t keep the technology up to date failure rates increase and faculty confidence decreases.  So let’s calculate what it costs to keep things fresh and functional.  Take the equipment list that you made before and assign each item a lifecycle in years.  Some parts will certainly last longer than others.  Cables should last longer than a projector.  VCRs may not be worth lifecycling.  They will hopefully go away soon.  Again determine this based on your environment for each item.  Now divide the cost of each item by its lifecycle.  This will give you an annual prorated cost to lifecycle each piece.  Now you can add those up and determine the per year cost to lifecycle a room.  Many of us can’t carry money from year to year.  You could calculate this based on the lifespan of each piece of equipment for each room.  This would provide more accurate information but would be more time consuming.  In the end amortizing the lifecycle costs over time allows money that you don’t use for one room to be spent in another room in one year and then visa versa the next. 

Determining the total cost of ownership is not an exact science.  It’s difficult if not impossible to estimate these costs to the dollar.  For a typical learning space at NC State, I have calculated an average of $8,000 per room per year to support the technology:  25% of this cost is the people, 25% of the cost is maintenance, and 50% of this cost is lifecycle.  I need to stress two critical factors:

1. $8,000 per room per year is based on NC State’s “Service Level Agreement” with its faculty as well as the campus environment that exists.  One major factor is that the campus is very large and divided into multiple sections that make walking to each one unrealistic if we hope to respond within 10 minutes.
2. This cost does NOT include any management, professional development, productivity, or other overhead related costs.  This is purely the cost of ownership for that learning space. 

The point here is to have a way to show administration that it does cost money to support technology in learning spaces over the long haul.  Failure to support this technology will cause faculty to become extremely frustrated and abandon using it.  The result being that the initial investment is now wasted.