ITASCA, IL--As part of its commitment to providing market-driven AV tools for the education community, D&M Professional, parent company of Denon Professional and Marantz Professional, recently hosted the second annual meeting of its Education Technology Advisory Council (ETAC).
The event took place at D&M Professional headquarters on April 8, 2008, and saw representatives from key college institutions sharing insight on the latest AV trends in schools. The roundtable featured such universities as University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Northwestern University and the College of DuPage. The discussion not only allowed these representatives to exchange ideas among one another surrounding the cutting edge of AV in schools, but it also gave D&M Professional's R&D department a keenly up-to-date idea of higher education's technology needs. This invaluable feedback will be used to develop products better aligned with the needs of the education marketplace, as well as for the creation of new ways to measure and analyze the entire media technology learning experience.
The ETAC was created by D&M Professional in 2007 as a diverse group of experts including members of the media services, AV managers and directors, classroom technologies teachers and administrators and others having direct involvement with recording technologies supporting the teaching and learning experience. Expanding on the resources of D&M Professional, the ETAC comprises a significant and unique knowledge pool in the educational media technology arena, drawing on its members' varied viewpoints as representatives of no fewer than 12 different universities. The ETAC is part of D&M Professional's Education Solutions Division (ESD), which is dedicated to exploring and sharing information about the confluence of AV technology trends. Its goal is to support university AV departments and campus technical managers with product and application information relating to digital audio/video media.
Specifically, the input from this year's session advances the knowledge base for key applications. "We gained a remarkable amount of knowledge in dialogue with our panel," stated D&M Professional Brand Manager Brian Gorman. "Podcasting is one of the biggest trends, and additionally there is a rapidly growing number of students and faculty in these schools recording, transferring, archiving and distributing audio of all sorts. Also, each of the schools is looking to expand and streamline its established network topology for the more immediate transfer of this recorded information. In other words, the exchange of ideas is becoming easier and easier, and D&M Professional sees a vital opportunity to grow along with the education community and provide the most up-to-date tools that we can for this market."
The ETAC has already been successful in bringing educational tools to market that might not exist otherwise. Gorman stated, "Based on 2007's panel, Marantz developed the Ethernet addressable PMD580 Solid State Recorder. It is the perfect recording tool for institutions that have the sort of network infrastructure that is becoming more and more standard in university IT environments, and it was a direct result of feedback from the education community."
D&M Professional…www.d-mpro.com
