131: Work Together To Make Some Difference with Tom Segers

About this episode

Ryan Gray interviews Tom Segers about supporting AV in higher education and the importance of community in the industry.

Recorded live at the HETMA booth on the show floor of ISE 2026, Ryan sits down with Belgium based higher ed AV leader Tom Segers from Thomas More University of Applied Sciences. They talk about what it looks like to support AV at scale with a tiny central team across multiple campuses, and why global community matters when higher education needs a louder voice in an industry that often defaults to corporate assumptions. Tom also shares a Europe specific lens that will feel immediately relevant to US listeners: multilingual collaboration, privacy expectations for students on camera, and why audio quality becomes the make or break layer in hybrid learning. The conversation lands on the practical reality we all live in, construction timelines and technology timelines never line up, so staying connected and learning from peers is not a nice to have, it is survival. Topics Discussed • Running AV services for 20,000 students with a three person expert team • Multi campus support challenges, travel time, local support structures • Finding HETMA through EDUCAUSE connections and building community infrastructure • Why higher ed needs collective leverage with manufacturers • English as the…

People in this episode

Host: Ryan Gray

Guest: Tom Segers

Topics covered

• AV support in higher education
• multilingual collaboration
• student privacy
• hybrid learning
• community in education
• technology timelines

Keywords

• AV services
• higher education
• multicampus support
• student privacy
• hybrid classrooms
• audio quality
• community infrastructure

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Thomas More University of Applied Sciences, HETMA, EDUCAUSE

Places: Belgium, Europe, US

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