City College of San Francisco

Introduction

The nation's largest community college is located in the city of San Francisco. This very large institution offers a wide variety of community college programs to thousands of students.

The college hired General Projection to design, build and program "smart classrooms" and distance learning capabilities for the school. Additionally, the conference room that would serve the school board and president was to be designed and built with video conferencing capability.

Design

General Projection installed high-resolution, high-brightness LCD projectors in each smart classroom for their simplicity of maintenance and use.

Source such as VHS and computer presentation were built into the capabilities of each room.

Rather than a smart lectern, as most universities use, the college chose a control methodology that better suited the "move around while you teach" philosophy of their professors.

A simple, handheld control was in order. General Projection provided and programmed the AMX SoftKey control system. This provides a small, handheld device with an LCD screen which allows for selection of sources, control over the room's environment and power for the various projection and routing equipment.

The challenge was that this device would be installed in every classroom. There was an engineering concern over whether or not the rooms systems would interfere with each other (the SoftKey is RF-based).

To solve this, General Projection added software to the control frame that could tell whether or not a control command had originated from within the room or not. This resulted in a very stable system that simply required the periodic battery change in the SoftKey.

The board room was designed with flexibility in mind. Computer presentations, video presentations and video conferences can occur in this room through a combination of audio, video and conferencing technologies. All of these complex items are run by a simple AMX touch panel.

Success

The classrooms have been a huge success with professors and students easily being able to perform presentations to the student body in each of the numerous smart classrooms.

Further, distance learning and video conferencing capability make this one of the more "connected" community colleges in the nation.

For more information on smart classroom or distance learning design and integration or other educational multimedia communications systems, please fill out our Information Request form or email us at Solutions@genproj.com