One word repeats in my mind: confident communication. I am judging undergraduate scholars during a symposium for poster presentations from students across disciplines and classifications. And I wish I could focus on the student's research, but I can’t get past the mumbling, backside of the student’s head while they navigate an unorganized poster with too much text and distracting graphics that have no citations. Like a superhero discovering their calling, I decide then to help my University improve the baseline quality of communication in all formats I can feasibly take on. So I fundraise and partner and manage to build a Studio dedicated to speech and media communication for all students, staff, and faculty. The drive for this work stems from my belief that either verbal or written, communication is a key outcome and marketable skill students in higher education should be more than adequate at in order to engage their newly forming discipline knowledge across global, networked communication systems.
This space is full of typical technology you find in a media lab: green screen, studio lights, boom mics, editing software, interview stations, and equipment checkout. However many groups had a unique idea of what a studio does, who their primary audience is, and how they should be able to access the spaces. So by interviewing and collecting information about need, timeline, purpose, impact, partnerships, human resources, and more, I was able to see superficial trends in need across research faculty, the student radio organization, course assignments, student practice, general tinkering projects, marketing department gaps, and the generally lost user who wandered in. The technological solution that is adaptable and capable of meeting most of the needs from a diverse audience and project loads is the One Button Studio project produced by Penn State University.
According to Penn State’s Website:
The One Button Studio is a user-friendly video recording setup that allows users to create high-quality and polished video projects without having to know anything about lights and cameras. The OBS works by bringing a flash drive and with a push of a single button, the user activates ceiling or wall-mount lights, camera, and microphone without physically interacting with any of these components. This service simplifies the video production workflow, eliminating several time-consuming steps. The end result is a studio experience that requires the bare minimum of time and effort while simultaneously providing a consistently high-quality result packaged on a thumb drive in a standard format video file.
By touring an existing OBS at a peer institution and finding the $10,000 startup funding from the COO at my University, myself and two students researched, purchased, prepped, assembled, installed, tested, and marketed this new service. We focused on Communication, Science, and Business faculty; research symposium organizers (Research and Graduate Student Office), creative-based student organizations like the radio, newspaper, and photography clubs; and peer learning consultants (tutors). We have seen over 5000 unique student visits in three years. Faculty are recording lectures for asynchronous access. Graduate students are filming grant proposals. Museum studies students are photographing cultural objects. Engineers and Business students are integrating animations while proposing their design products. Undergraduate research scholars are rebuilding graphs from illegible lab equipment printouts. Headshots, music creation, interviews, and so much more are delivered through the Studio and OBS and all by providing accessible and simplified process to complicated media technology.
Penn State University. (2021). One Button Studio. https://onebutton.psu.edu/
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