Driven by faculty needs, Cornell’s college and school audiovisual support teams collaborated with CIT to create a unified, intuitive classroom technology experience—a single touch panel interface designed to strengthen both teaching support and AV support at scale.

“Professors from one school are teaching in the classrooms of another,” said Michael Broughton, a member of the CIT's Video Engineering & Event Services (VE&ES) AV engineering team with experience creating touch panel user interfaces. “We heard from faculty that they were having drastically different experiences with classroom technology from one building or unit to the next, and it was negatively impacting their teaching. With a standard user interface (UI) and control code, faculty can expect any classroom they enter to work exactly the same way as every other room they’ve taught in.”

This new interface replaces the Cornell Configurator, a campus standard created in 2016, and nearly a dozen different designs deployed by off-campus AV integrators. While these interfaces served many classrooms well for years, they predated today’s hybrid teaching demands—Zoom-enabled rooms, with multiple cameras, ceiling microphones, and more complex display configurations. The rapid growth of those technologies had outpaced what the old UIs could realistically support.

Collaboration Is Key to Successful Classroom Tech Support

To align the touch panel UI across the Ithaca campus, CIT VE&ES began by meeting with AV and IT support staff in every college and school. These conversations revealed the full range of UIs already in use, highlighted what worked locally, and gathered ideas for what a new campus standard should look like.

This discovery effort also included the support perspective—what would help local technicians in each unit, and what would help CIT deliver consistent service across campus. Despite strong preferences for certain features or layouts, most units agreed that a single, campus-wide UI would ultimately make life easier for instructors and support teams alike, even if it meant adjusting some unit-specific design ideals.

Behind the scenes, the AV Standards Committee—with representatives from every college and school, plus CIT—helped ensure the control code and system design aligned with Cornell’s broader AV ecosystem. An extensive needs analysis followed, focusing on usability today and expandability for the next generation of classroom technology.

The VE&ES team synthesized all of this input into a working demo and presented it back to their campus AV support colleagues. That feedback informed another round of refinements, resulting in a prototype ready for real world testing. This prototype was installed in several classrooms over the winter break between the Fall 2024 and Spring 2025 semesters. Instructors and support staff who used the new interface in those first rooms responded positively, confirming that the new design improved clarity, reduced confusion, and cut down on support calls.

Building for Scalability and Seamless Updates

Over the summer of 2025, central and unit-level classroom tech teams rolled out the standardized UI to many more rooms, continuing to adjust the new core UI based on feedback from local IT staff and end users.

“The College of Arts & Sciences undertook a major project to bring technology consistency to over 100 classrooms and chose the new UI for that modernization initiative,” Broughton said. “We also installed the UI in 16 room upgrade projects scheduled for the summer, which our CIT AV Installation service was hired to complete. This upgrade spanned rooms in the SC Johnson College of Business, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell’s libraries and several other units.”

Complementing the UI is the underlying control code developed by Jeff MacDonald and the audio configuration files maintained by Kenny Christianson.  The UI, control code and DSP (audio) work hand in hand to give the CIT AV team flexibility when it comes to new installations.  The UI and code can support anything from a single display meeting room to the largest of lecture halls and was built from the ground up to ensure flexibility.  "Our ability to react to new issues and only have to update one piece of code, not hundreds, is a key piece of what's been created." said Jeff MacDonald, also on the VE&ES AV Engineering team.

"A key foundational piece in helping this come to be is the work that AV Engineering, Network Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering, Hostmaster and the IT Security Office have done over the last ten years to create a solid bedrock for AV system networking and deployment which now spans hundreds of systems across the entirety of the Ithaca campus and beyond, supporting all different types of installations" said Ryan Engels, the VE&ES AV Engineering and Project Management team lead.

In addition to outfitting newly upgraded rooms, CIT is also working with units to bring older systems forward—updating legacy touch panels to the new UI without requiring full hardware replacement, when that is compatible with the room’s technology lifecycle. This ensures that more classrooms can gain the benefits of the new interface sooner and more affordably.

A Foundation for Future Flexibility

Built through a process of continual collaboration, testing, and refinement, the new classroom AV touch panel UI reflects a shared commitment to usability and long-term sustainability. Its design anticipates ongoing growth in hybrid instruction, new audio and video technologies, and future teaching tools still to come.   

What began as a patchwork of interfaces across colleges is now becoming a unified teaching tool—one that supports instructors, strengthens campus-wide AV operations, and positions Cornell for the next wave of classroom innovation.