Extron AV Solutions Enhance the Learning Experience at Lee University School of Nursing

Experiencing growing student enrollment in 2016, Lee University, a private Christian institution in Tennessee, constructed a spacious hall for its School of Nursing to host lectures covering nursing procedures, biology, and life sciences. The hall has soaring ceilings, tiered deck seating for 120+, and an extensive audiovisual system. To meet the challenges of COVID-19 and support remote learning, AV streaming capabilities were retrofitted into the audiovisual system in 2020. The hall reopened to students and faculty in spring 2021. It’s a popular venue, always heavily booked. AV system design and installation was a joint effort by Lee University’s Information Technology Lab Manager Mark Mong and pro-AV integration firm Encore Broadcast Solutions. The Encore team was led by Glenn Bradley, sales manager at Encore’s Bridgeport, Alabama office. Extron supplied AV switching, distribution, control, and streaming equipment for the project.

The university’s Mark Mong praises Extron’s support throughout installation, commissioning, and daily operation, remarking, “If I ever need something, I just call. They have an engineer on the line to help you immediately, no matter when you call. That’s what’s so cool about Extron. They’re all over the world. They’re ready to help, anytime, anywhere.”

Lecturers can load presentation material onto the PC in the AV operator desk or bring a laptop containing presentation material. Convenient guest connections for power, HDMI, DisplayPort, and USB-C cables are available at a Cable Cubby® 202 cable access enclosure on the AV operator desk and a TLP Pro 320C Cable Cubby TouchLink® Pro Touchpanel in the podium. Lecturers can tap, write, and draw on their presentations through a touchscreen at the podium that links to an Annotator 300 Annotation Processor. Teaching materials are displayed on a large projection screen at the stage, and on four flat panel displays located on the front and back walls of the hall. A DTP CrossPoint 84 4K Scaling Presentation Matrix Switcher performs AV signal switching and video scaling. AV content selection and other AV system functions are controlled by a TLP Pro 1025T 10″ TouchLink Pro Touchpanel at an operator desk, or by the TLP Pro 320C 3.5″ flip-up touchscreen at the podium. The switcher’s integrated 100-watt amplifier drives the room’s speakers. An SMP 351 Streaming Media Processor, added during the 2020 retrofit, records and streams lectures for remote learners, and enables “capture and carry” lecture storage to memory sticks via a USB port on an RCP 101 EU Remote Control Panel.