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Transforming the student experience with digital learning tech
Challenge
Create a digital teaching platform to enhance collaboration and support modern learning in a new campus.
Solution
Kinly designed and integrated a flexible AV system, including digital screens and a remote-control platform to improve teaching efficiency.
Result
The solution maximised student engagement, improved lecturer satisfaction and saved the university over £150,000 per year on maintenance, projector bulbs and electricity.
The background
The University of Northampton (UoN) is one the UK’s youngest universities. Standing on the banks of the River Nene, its advanced new Waterside Campus supports over 15,000 students. Enter one of its five buildings, you soon spot signs of an extensive digital transformation journey. Impressive, multi-screen video walls display event information.
Interactive wayfinding kiosks show you around. Students and lecturers gather around screens, sharing content and collaborating across 116 teaching spaces. It’s all part of a new IT and AV teaching platform designed by UoN to deliver to transform lives and inspire change.
UoN wanted create a student-centric teaching infrastructure that attracts digitally fluent students in a competitive marketplace. It needed to enable collaborative and independent learning, nurture students’ digital literacy and prepare them for the world of work. Kinly was appointed as a trusted technology advisor to design and integrate cutting-edge AV solutions that support UoN in its mission to offer a first-class digital learning experience.
The solution
When the University changed its preferred control technology and teaching platform just weeks before the final high-level design deadline, the pressure was on for the Kinly team. Collaborating with Andrew Taylor, UoN’s Digital Integration Lead, we rapidly designed a working solution that integrated technology from a revised mix of vendors.
“We had a really short timeframe to turn our new high-level design into a working system. Kinly rose to the challenge and delivered for us,” said Andrew.
With installation and commissioning complete, the Waterside campus welcomed its first students on schedule in September. Students immediately see the difference. Rhey no longer get frustrated watching lecturers battle broken projectors. Instead, lecturers upload teaching materials in advance to the university’s virtual learning environment. Then, as class starts, they simply open their laptops, connect to the AV platform and materials instantly appear on digital screens. As a result, students get more value from their contact time.
“It’s more enjoyable for our lecturers, who can focus on teaching,” says Andrew. “But it’s fantastic for our students who benefit from the more engaging, collaborative teaching style our platform supports.”
The platform has transformed how Andrew’s team works. Every morning, he runs a remote maintenance check, sending out commands to the AV equipment across campus. His team then fixes any potential issues, ensuring the equipment is working – long before students and lecturers arrive for classes. The combination of control platform and well-installed equipment has also boosted overall reliability. “We’ve got far fewer technical issues to deal with now,” says Andrew.