Old Dominion’s digital transformation calls for cutting-edge tech (and regular ol’ switches)

Virginia’s Old Dominion University is registering something new for class.

About 20 rooms across ODU’s campus feature AI-enabled cameras that autonomously track in on professors; screens that display automatic transcription; a giant digital board for instructors; and a dedicated space to teach live classes over Zoom.

Behind all that cutting-edge technology is a familiar networking component: each room has a brand-new network switch, a pizza-box-sized device inside its audio/visual (AV) closet.

A digital transformation effort, it turns out, requires a lot of planning with the networking team—and sometimes a special delivery of a dozen or more tech components.

“Be ready.” That’s never the most assuring phrase for a network pro to hear, but that’s what Dwayne Smith, executive director of digital integration environments at ODU, told his networking staff over the summer, following a mandate to kick off the company’s “Forward-Focused Digital Transformation” project.

The project came with some hefty deliverables. High-resolution lecture feeds from the new AI-enabled cameras, for example, call for uncompressed gigabit-level video streams in each classroom. And it’s not just the instructor’s laptop getting put onto the big screen: There are digital whiteboards, overhead document cameras, network-connected microphones, and network-connected speakers, to name a few pieces of hardware needing to be integrated into the tech stack. (And Old Dominion is not the only school undergoing a digital transformation…and a remodeling of network infrastructure.)

The effort required AV over IP—a technique that transmits audio and visual signals over the network using Internet Protocol; this is a big step up from traditional academic AV setups, which usually involve an HDMI cable going from the instructor’s laptop to a display.

Why now for digital transformation? Smith believes the digital transformation is a competitive differentiator in a corner of Virginia that has 33 colleges, universities, and trade schools.

“Today’s students grew up as digital natives, and they expect their learning environment to reflect the technology-forward world they’ll be entering as professionals,” Smith wrote to IT Brew in an email following an interview. “When a prospective student walks into a lecture hall and sees outdated technology, it sends a signal about the institution’s commitment to their education.” (Just under one-third of the school’s 22,000-plus students attend remotely, according to a message from the Office of the Provost. )

With each AV source becoming a high-bandwidth network stream, Bob McCoy, lead network design engineer at ODU, had to do some thinking on the “be ready” directive.

When Smith first asked for 12 network connections (“drops”) in each classroom, and then 30, McCoy’s team did a cost comparison: Buying low-level switches for each classroom beat the idea of running 12 to 30 network cables through walls to a centralized closet with the existing switches.

The new switches add flexibility, too: If a classroom gets converted to office space, you’re not stuck with 30 holes in the wall. “If they don’t want it, then we can take that switch out and repurpose it for another use case somewhere else in the organization,” McCoy said.

The plan. McCoy’s steps for each switch included:

• A predesigned configuration template (including security settings), and a prewritten designation of certain ports for certain categories of AV gear.
• Swapping in room-specific attributes like adding and connecting a building’s network to an instructor PC. In short: “Open the box, plug it in, dump the config on, save it, unplug it, take it to the classroom,” McCoy said.
• Screwing the switch into the AV cabinet.

Then, AV installers would run Ethernet copper patch cables from devices to the local switch. Each AV closet also features a high-speed fiber-optic bundle that provides a high-speed connection from each classroom to ODU’s core routers.

“In theory, we can pump 25 gigs a second out of that classroom to go somewhere else,” McCoy said.

What to watch for. With each switch taking up two ports in the college’s main routers, McCoy has considered that a scaled implementation might max out the school’s current infrastructure. (There are around 300 classrooms, McCoy noted, which could call for bigger routers and more ports.) Also, with potentially 30 devices sending 700 MBs per second out of each switch, there’s a massive demand on bandwidth.

Starting with 20 rooms allows the teams to “fail fast,” according to Smith. For example, they could learn that maybe a certain classroom doesn’t need a fiber-optic uplink, or that a classroom hates the fan noise coming out of their AV cabinet. Whether it’s 20 or 300 classrooms—Smith said the plan is to get to 65 equipped classrooms this summer—the cutting-edge technologies will require some good old-fashioned networking.

“Network is almost as important as power these days. It’s a required resource in our everyday life,” Smith said. “The only way to do that is to have a local switch.”