TO BE DELETED Bryant University Uses Stem in Their Most Challenging Rooms

About Bryant University

Established in 1863, Bryant is a private New England university with a tradition of innovation and a global vision for success. Bryant’s unique curriculum, where every student majors in either the College of Arts and Sciences or College of Business while minoring in the other, has placed them 2nd on U.S. News and World Report’s 2015 list of “up-and-coming” universities, while Bloomberg BusinessWeek names Bryant one of the top 50 universities in the country.

Challenge

As the Fall semester approached, Bryant University had to work quickly to outfit some of their more unconventional environments for distance learning. They were looking for a solution that could provide their users with high quality, scalable coverage to create more spaces for socially distanced classes including, “a 300 seat auditorium that we hadn’t planned on mic’ing but needed to be outfitted on short notice. We weren’t really sure how we were going to mic a space that large,” said Daniel Greene, Senior Media Services Analyst at Bryant University. Phil Lombardi, director of academic computing and media services explains other spaces they were outfitting, “are not your typical academic teaching environments which made it a huge challenge for us. For example, we have one room which is a fitness room with hardwood floors and glass walls and originally we had two large 75” TV’s on a cart with a Zoom capable web conferencing system and a small microphone. It was just not doing a good job of picking up students on the far end of the room.”

Solution

The team at Bryant University started by trying out a few Stem Tables and conducting a couple test recordings, one without the Stem Table devices and one with. “What a difference. We thought if this can work in this 300 seat auditorium space with a handful of Stem Table devices, then we can accommodate some of our more challenging spaces that didn’t have any mics and this was a critical piece to get our classrooms up and running for hybrid learning,” said Lombardi.

Results

Scalability was huge for us, the competing product we’re using in our other rooms are a two mic system with two ceiling pods and that’s it. Scalability was something we realized that we needed with these larger spaces. It didn’t matter how good the mic was if you couldn’t get enough microphones in the room so having the ability to do up to five devices in the room allowed us to really spread out the coverage,” said Greene. With the implementation of Stem’s ecosystem, Greene says, “Stem has allowed our classes to be so much more collaborative. Now our faculty can facilitate conversations and discussions in classes so it’s pretty awesome.”