Duquesne University opts for Crowd Mics communication for its classes

The solution Crowd Mics of Biamp enhances interaction with students in the classrooms of the Duquesne University (Pennsylvania – Us.) putting a microphone in each mobile phone owner's pocket.

The main arguments of the Duquesne University for the election of Crowd Mics, a microphone solution developed by Biamp available in Spain through the network of AVIT Vision, have been their simplicity and cost-effectiveness in enabling personal voice communications in their classrooms and conference rooms, without interrupting the class by passing the microphones back and forth.

Located in the Allegheny Mountains, west of Pennsylvania, Duquesne University is a private Catholic research center, with some 6.000 enrolled college students. When a school of osteopathic medicine recently opened in the faculty of this discipline, their managers saw the need to improve the communication capacity of their classrooms.

The auditoriums, with a capacity between one hundred and three hundred seats, are equipped with standard chairs and tables. Even with acoustic treatments already installed, when conference rooms fill up there is a big background noise that makes it difficult for students to be heard clearly when asking questions.

Another problem is that sometimes teachers could not identify which student the question came from. Therefore, due to complexity of matter and limited class time, their managers considered that moving back and forth wireless microphones was not the best solution.

The initial request from the Faculty of Medicine was to install individual microphones in each seat of the conference room. However, given the omnipresence of mobile use among college students, a communication solution was sought using a technology already known as.

Given the size of the user population, the university has deployed multiple VLANs to split network traffic, so the microphone solution had to adapt to the same.

"Students are in one VLAN and teaching staff in another. So for universities to use, the solution has to be able to work on all these networks smoothly, and Crowd Mics fits perfectly", explains Todd Hughes, technology manager at Duquesne University.

Biamp's Crowd Mics solution boosts audience interaction, putting a microphone ' in your pocket’ of every owner of a smartphone (smartphone), quickly and easily.

That's what Lauren Turin points out, director of classroom technology at this institution: “the key to the adoption and acceptance of Crowd Mics is or simplicity. Just download the app, and students already know how to do it; it's very easy to use, no instructions needed”.

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