RGB helps Harvard Business School create a hybrid classroom learning environment

QuadView's viewing capability allows remote students to be supported in video conferencing sessions, incorporating dynamic content from different sources.

In response to the pandemic, Harvard Business School (HBS) needed to provide a learning experience that would suit both remote and face-to-face students. To meet this challenge, a collaborative team within HBS's IT department designed hybrid classrooms to accommodate both face-to-face and remote students in a family teaching environment.

HBS audiovisual engineers and pedagogical designers faced significant design requirements. First of all, needed classroom whiteboards and classroom materials to be visible to remote students, allowing teachers to teach in the classroom as they did before the pandemic. Secondly, they had to grasp the faces of individual classroom students and remote students and see each other together simultaneously.

A simple path was needed to support remote students, the ideal was video conferencing. The main challenge was to incorporate into these videoconferencing sessions the variety of dynamic content, like slates, whiteboards, PC cameras and presentations. To achieve this, HBS engineers used the multi-image viewing capability of the QuadView multivisor of RGB Spectrum.

QuadView UHDx displays up to four simultaneously switchable sources in a consolidated image in a variety of customizable layouts. Each hybrid classroom contains a variety of sources for student visualization.

The classroom is equipped with a 4K camera, that captures a wide picture of the educator's board and the front of the room, and a second, showing students in the classroom. Additional sources include document cameras.

QuadView UHDx combines up to four of these fonts into windows and powers this unique and consolidated output in the video teleconferencing application distributed to remote students. Multivisor provides remote students with a correlative view of the classroom, of his peers and the teacher, to encourage classroom interaction.

“We needed a multivisor to preserve the high 4K image quality of the cameras, in addition to the flexibility of custom designs, stratification and window trimming. QuadView was the best product that could meet these requirements at an affordable price. Makes remote students part of the classroom experience”, justin Fowler says, Senior AV Engineer at Harvard Business School.

RGB Spectrum's QuadView UHDx multivisor displays up to four sources on a single screen with up to 4K resolution at 60Hz with customizable display windows.

Educators can mix sources of different resolutions, scale any input to 4K resolution and direct any input to any window. Up to 32 Designs.

The audio switching it integrates allows you to select the audio from the source, even those not shown at the time. Control methods include the front panel, a web interface and third-party control devices. QuadView allows educators to teach as if everyone is present in the room, with a correlative view of the content to broaden the conversation.

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