The AV Spotlight Series features conversations with higher ed AV and IT leaders – built around direct questions that reveal candid perspectives and hard-earned lessons.
Behind the systems that power modern learning environments are professionals who are rarely visible, but deeply responsible. This series brings their thinking to the forefront: practical insight, unfiltered opinions, and experience shaped on the front lines.
Troy Powers
AV Systems Support Lead | Northwestern University
Troy Powers is a higher ed AV professional who has worked across the full lifecycle of classroom technology, from testing and design to programming, installation, long-term support, and decommissioning. Known for his direct feedback to manufacturers and systems-level thinking, Troy operates at the intersection of pedagogy, production, and scale.
He helped lead one of the earliest large-scale campus returns to in-person instruction during COVID, transforming classrooms into live production environments almost overnight.
1. What’s a project or initiative you’re most proud of and why did it matter?
TP: Getting our campus ready to come back from COVID was probably the project I’m most proud of.
We were one of the first schools to come back: We were partially in person in the summer and fully back in the fall of 2020. At that point, we maybe had five classrooms that were capture-ready, Zoom-ready. We had to add cameras to basically every other classroom.
Just being able to get there, to get all those classes ready – that mattered. We opened in fall of 2020, and that was a huge lift.
2. What do most people misunderstand about what higher ed AV professionals actually do?
TP: The misunderstanding is that we just support. Or that we just design.
I do everything on my campus. I test new gear before I design with it. We design it. We program it. We install it. We support it throughout its lifetime. And then we take it out at the end of the day.
I’m in a unique position to provide feedback to manufacturers that not many other people in the industry are, because I do all of those things. My feedback is wholesale feedback, it’s not just about installing it or just about supporting it. I can give feedback on every aspect of your product.
As a manufacturer, you can be assured I’m going to give you honest feedback, because I don’t have anything to gain except your product being better.
3. What’s a hard truth about classroom or campus AV?
TP: They’re all live events. I support a thousand live events every day. Everything is an emergency when something goes wrong. Almost all of my classes are 50 minutes long. If they lose five minutes, they’ve lost 10% of their class. That’s a lot of time.
So everything is an emergency when something isn’t working. It’s got to be fixed immediately. Fifteen minutes is too long.
“[Lectures] are all live events. I support a thousand live events every day. Everything is an emergency when something goes wrong."
4. What’s a decision you’ve made that significantly improved outcomes for faculty and students?
TP: Creating a more repeatable process that has accountability built into it for proactively maintaining the classrooms.
We check our classrooms once a week, and our larger classrooms twice a week. It’s reduced issues a great deal.
5. What qualities do you look for in AV tools you trust at scale and why?
TP: Ease of use is probably one of the most important, because so much of my workforce is student-based. I can’t have something that’s going to take too long to train them on.
I need a simple dashboard students can readily understand, and then more advanced features on the backend for full-time staff.
Epiphan Edge does a really good job of making things easily available. What I really like about Edge is that I can one-click through to the admin page. I don’t need to type something into a browser. If five minutes is 10% of a class time, the 30 seconds I save matters.