For years, educational AV projects were treated as isolated technology deployments: a lecture-capture system here, a collaboration platform there, a room refresh tied to a capital project or grant cycle. Each was a transaction. Few were a strategy.
That model is now disappearing. Across higher education, institutions are recognizing that communication systems are no longer peripheral classroom tools. They are operational infrastructure — as critical to the student and faculty experience as the network itself.
The numbers explain the shift. By 2024, roughly a third of U.S. undergraduates were taking at least some coursework at a distance, and nearly half of graduate students were studying fully online; 98% of universities now offer online learning, up from 77% in 2018. Hybrid is no longer an exception layered onto a physical campus — for a large share of learners, it is the campus. When that many people depend on a system to participate, the system stops being equipment. It becomes infrastructure.
Expectations have changed just as dramatically. Today’s learning environments must support hybrid teaching, asynchronous participation, accessibility requirements, real-time collaboration, AI-supported workflows and increasingly complex digital ecosystems — all while remaining intuitive enough that faculty and students barely notice the technology at all.
That last part matters most. The best educational technology is invisible. In fact, when technology stops being treated as equipment and starts being treated as infrastructure, it reshapes how systems are designed and how institutions evaluate resilience, scalability and long-term operational value.
The End of Fragmented AV Thinking
One of the biggest challenges universities face is fragmentation. Many campuses still run on layers of technology accumulated over years of independent departmental decisions, shifting standards, and disconnected procurement cycles. The result is a patchwork where systems technically function but operationally create friction — for faculty, IT teams and students alike.
A lecture hall may contain multiple platforms that don’t communicate cleanly. Collaboration tools differ building to building. Hybrid teaching works flawlessly in one room and fails entirely in the next. Support becomes reactive rather than strategic.
In higher education, inconsistency quickly becomes an experience problem. Students expect seamless participation regardless of location. Faculty expect systems to work immediately, without technical intervention. Institutions also need infrastructure that adapts to evolving teaching models without a complete redesign every few years.
This is why infrastructure-first thinking matters. Rather than approaching AV as a series of standalone room deployments, universities are beginning to think holistically about communications ecosystems across the entire campus. This is the difference between innovation and integration. “Innovation without integration is just noise” which, in practice, means prioritizing interoperability, standardization, operational resilience and lifecycle management from the outset.
Infrastructure Must Support Flexibility
The modern classroom is no longer confined to four walls. Teaching now happens simultaneously across physical and digital environments. A single session may involve in-room students, remote participants, recorded content, AI-generated transcription, accessibility tools and collaborative platforms operating at once.
That complexity demands systems designed for flexibility, not fixed use cases, and the pace is not slowing. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 projects that 59% of the global workforce will need significant reskilling or upskilling by 2030, with nearly two-fifths (39%) of today’s core skills expected to be transformed or outdated over the same period. Institutions running on multi-year, static curricula are being asked to keep pace with a workforce that is re-tooling in real time.
Integrators increasingly need to think less like equipment providers and more like infrastructure architects. The question is no longer “What hardware does this room need?” but “How does this environment adapt as institutional needs evolve?”
Scalability becomes essential. Universities may begin with a handful of hybrid-enabled rooms before expanding institution-wide. They may introduce AI-supported workflows incrementally — a direction the sector is clearly moving in. The 2025 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report found generative AI embedded, explicitly or implicitly, in all six of the key technologies expected to shape teaching and learning, alongside rising adoption of VR and inclusive-design practices. Teaching models themselves may shift entirely over the lifespan of the infrastructure.
Systems built around rigid, product-specific workflows struggle in that environment. Systems built around interoperability and operational adaptability are far more resilient.
Invisible Technology Is the Goal
There is also a cultural shift underway in how we talk about educational technology. For years, much of AV chased visible innovation — bigger displays, more elaborate control systems, ever more feature-rich rooms. Innovation still matters. But institutions are increasingly measuring success differently.
Technology succeeds when it disappears into the workflow. Faculty don’t want to become operators. Students don’t want to troubleshoot participation tools. IT teams don’t want ecosystems that demand constant manual intervention.
The expectation now is that communication systems feel frictionless, predictable and intuitive. The irony is that delivering that simplicity requires significantly more sophisticated infrastructure underneath: standardized deployment methodologies, integrated management platforms, resilient network architecture and operational support models that extend well beyond installation day.
This is where integrators have an opportunity to reposition themselves.
Moving from Vendor to Strategic Partner
The institutions navigating these transitions most successfully tend to work with partners who understand operational outcomes, not just technical specifications. Higher-education leaders increasingly want guidance on long-term technology strategy: how to future-proof learning environments, how to standardize experiences across campuses, how to support evolving pedagogical models and how to build systems that stay adaptable over time.
That requires a different kind of conversation. Instead of leading with products, integrators can lead with workflow analysis, systems interoperability, governance models, and lifecycle planning. The role becomes less transactional and far more consultative.
This is not a fringe bet. With pro AV on track to grow from $332 billion in 2025 to $402 billion by 2030, along with the rise of investments from private equity firms in commercial AV, it is a bet that communication and learning infrastructure are now enterprise-critical and that coherence in signal systems matters at the very top of global business. If major companies are investing at that scale to unify signal, experience and training, higher education has to ask whether it is ready to compete at the same level of coherence.
Accessibility also raises the stakes further. Under the Department of Justice’s April 2024 ADA Title II rule, public colleges and universities must bring their web content and digital services — increasingly including the platforms that deliver hybrid and recorded instruction — into conformance with WCAG 2.1 AA, with compliance for larger institutions now due by April 2027. Accessibility is no longer a feature request. It is an operational mandate, and it is far easier to meet from a coherent infrastructure than from a patchwork.
Final Thoughts
In many ways, education is becoming one of the clearest proving grounds for infrastructure-led AV thinking, because the demands are so multidimensional. Budgets are constrained. User groups are diverse. Expectations are extremely high. And operational failure is immediately visible. Universities are being asked to support some of the most sophisticated communication environments anywhere, often with fewer resources than enterprises operating at similar technical complexity.
That pressure creates innovation. It also creates lessons for the wider AV industry. The institutions teaching the next generation of designers, engineers and operators are also among the most honest critics of the infrastructure we build for them. That is precisely why higher education matters so much to the future of communications systems design.
The campuses solving these challenges today are likely defining the operational standards that the rest of the market will follow tomorrow.
Ben C. Roth is founder and CEO, Original Syndicate.
