Alvernia University

About Alvernia University

Alvernia University is a private Catholic university in Reading, Pennsylvania that offers more than 600 courses and over 50 undergraduate majors and minors to its estimated 3,000-students.

Challenge

Alvernia University wanted to reach a wider audience of students and local residents for classes, lectures, community events, and performances across its three campuses in eastern Pennsylvania. Their media suite facility houses a 125-seat lecture hall featuring videoconferencing systems that connect to the university’s two satellite campuses and outside endpoints for distance learning. The challenge was to seamlessly integrate state-of-the-art technologies that had worked in traditional classes and use them for satellite campuses, performances and other community events.

Solution

Kramer’s solution allows multiple users with different skill levels to easily control and manage AV sources throughout the site. The site includes a lecture hall, video studio, control room, sound room and an interactive computer lab. With Kramer products seamlessly integrated, participants are now able to access a variety of sources quickly and easily.

Three sets of Kramer TP-121EDID and TP-122EDID twisted pair transmitter/receivers transmit VGA signals from a document camera, laptop and room PC directly to the matrix switcher. Three sets of Kramer PT-571 and PT-572+ twisted pair transmitter/receivers transmit HDMI signals from a DVD/ VCR, laptop PC and Blu-ray DVD player to a Kramer VS-66HDCP DVI matrix switcher.

Three DLP projectors display video and source material in the lecture hall and are connected to the system through three Kramer VP-437xl HDMI scaler/switchers. A fourth VP-437xl unit links to a Kramer FC-32 DVI to computer graphics/component video format converter which sends a signal back to the control room.

A Kramer VP-731 ProScale® digital scaler/switcher distributes video sources to the video conferencing codec. Kramer DGKat™ cabling is used throughout the media center, connecting video sources with cable runs of up to 160 feet.

Results

“The system has been a success for us because the technology was designed to be as easy as possible,” said Miro Liwosz, Instructional Media Specialist at Alvernia University. “We want the focus to be on instructing, so we made sure the technology did not get in the way of the content.”

The solution’s reliability was critical because it would be used by a wide variety of people. It had to be intuitive and work every time. “The Kramer product was not only reliable, but the value associated with Kramer was also of utmost importance for an education client,” said Bob Lobascio, Vice President of Sales at IMS Audio Visual, the local professional integrator.