131: Work Together To Make Some Difference with Tom Segers

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 shared language at global AV events
• Talking to R and D on the show floor, why it matters more than sales conversations
• Hybrid and connected classroom momentum since the pandemic
• Student privacy expectations in Europe and what that changes operationally
• Audio as the most important, most expensive layer in hybrid rooms
• Funding models and lifecycle planning for refresh and replacement

Connect with Tom Segers
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-segers-19b89676/
Thomas More: https://thomasmore.be/en

Connect with Ryan
@Ryan_A_Gray
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanagray/
[e-mail]

Voiceover by Chris Dechter

Have feedback or guest ideas? Let us know!

This show is a production of Higher Ed AV Media. Visit www.HigherEdAV.com for fresh content every day!