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 – EU) putting a microphone in the pocket of every mobile phone owner.

The main arguments of the Duquesne University for the election of Crowd Mics, a microphone solution developed by Biamp and available in Spain through the network of integrators of AVIT Vision, have been its simplicity and cost-effectiveness to enable personal voice communications in your classrooms and conference rooms, without having to interrupt the class by passing the microphones from one side to the other.

Located in the Allegheny Mountains, Western Pennsylvania, Duquesne University is a private Catholic research center, with some 6.000 enrolled university students. By recently inaugurating a school of osteopathic medicine in the faculty of this discipline, Those responsible 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 lot of 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.. For this reason and due to the complexity of the subject and the limited class time, Those responsible considered that moving the wireless microphones from one place to another was not the best solution.

The initial request from the Faculty of Medicine was to install individual microphones in each seat of the lecture hall.. However, given the omnipresence of mobile phone use among university students, A communication solution was sought using an already known technology.

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

“Students are on one VLAN and faculty are on another.”. So for universities to use it, the solution has to be able to work on all these networks without problems, and Crowd Mics fits the bill.”, explica Todd Hughes, technology manager at Duquesne University.

Biamp's Crowd Mics solution enhances interaction with the audience, putting a microphone in your pocket’ of every smart mobile phone owner (smartphone), quickly and easily.

This is what Lauren Turin points out, director of classroom technology at this institution: “The key to adoption and acceptance of Crowd Mics is simplicity. You just have to download the application, and the students already know how to do it; it is very easy to use, no instructions needed”.