Australia's Charles Sturt University (CSU) has selected the Pexip Infinity scalable meeting platform to power the institution's new distance learning program. The education and communications network will allow students, faculty, and staff to instantly communicate face-to-face via personal virtual meeting rooms (VMRs) that foster engagement and collaboration.
Charles Sturt University is Australia's largest regional educational institution and is celebrating its 25th year, although its rich history traces back more than 120 years. Now with an excess of 20,000 students enrolled in undergraduate, postgraduate, or single subjects, CSU's leading global distance education program has become the largest in the region. Using the Pexip Infinity scalable meeting platform, the continuing education program provides intuitive online learning where students and lecturers can meet in VMRs in order to participate in classroom discussions, knowledge sharing, or team-based collaborations within an easy-to-use virtual environment.
"CSU is the leading provider of distance education in Australia, with 60-percent of our students studying fully online, so the solution needed to be accessible from many different devices, from any location, and required the scaling capabilities to facilitate the provision of the video conferencing service to that cohort," said Philip Roy, acting Executive Director of Information Technology at CSU. "By deploying Pexip Infinity, we've taken a definitive step in ensuring that our online learning remains empowering and simple to use while guaranteeing that it can be easily expanded to meet any of our future requirements. By giving our distance learning students their own personal VMRs, we're taking away some of the fear and mystery of not being able to physically attend classes on campus."
Powering more than 25,000 VMRs and virtual auditoriums, Pexip Infinity will be deployed at multiple data centers and managed from a single location by a team of only two administrators. CSU reckons that the majority of students will be active users within 12 months. Pexip Infinity natively supports HD video conferencing right from inside any major web browser, including Microsoft®Internet Explorer®, Apple Safari®, Google® Chrome™, Mozilla Firefox® and Opera™. With CSU's primary end user client being web-browser based, Infinity removes any accessibility obstacles, providing the easiest-to-use distance learning solution that doesn't require participants to be IT experts in order to engage.
