The University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), located less than two miles east of the Las Vegas Strip, is a public research university with a diverse student body of over 31,000 undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students. No stranger to leveraging technology to enhance the educational experience, UNLV was one of the first higher education institutions to adopt lecture capture across their sprawling urban campus.
“Our journey with lecture capture started in 2018,” Frank Alaimo, manager of Classroom Technology Services at UNLV explained. “We did a pilot program, adding ceiling microphones, cameras, and lecture capture hardware devices inside the lecterns. But, with failures, update issues, and increased recording demands on our campus, we realized that we needed a better piece of hardware. We were still reliant upon equipment that was just, frankly, outdated.”
A team led by Alaimo and Andrew Borts, senior instructional technology specialist at UNLV, spearheaded the university’s recent effort to finally bring a cohesive, state-of-the-art lecture capture solution to campus—one that would integrate seamlessly with an existing Panopto content management system, as well as Crestron room control.
[Class of 2024: University of Nevada, Las Vegas]
An AV Solution, Years in the Making
Rigorous testing eventually led Alaimo and Borts to select Epiphan Video’s Pearl Nexus. The enterprise-grade lecture capture solution offered UNLV everything it needed: effortless integration with AV infrastructure, robust remote management through Epiphan Edge, and streamlined installation allowing over 200 units to be deployed across campus. The simplicity and speed of installation were remarkable, with each device taking less than 10 minutes to set up.
With approximately 215 general-purpose classrooms—more than half of which needed to be equipped with lecture capture—as well as research spaces of various kinds, versatility was another key sticking point for UNLV. “We have plenty of different spaces where research is going on: labs, golf simulators, instruction kitchens, and all types of other facilities that needed to make use of this recording capability,” Alaimo said. “When it came to our AV ecosystems in our classrooms, the Pearl Nexus just worked with everything.”
Borts echoed this, highlighting the incredibly smooth transition from their legacy system to Pearl Nexus: “The best part about Pearl Nexus is we've been able to make it feel like it's been part of the infrastructure for as long as we've known, even though we've just started using it.”
Working in tandem with the Pearl Nexus, the Epiphan Edge remote monitoring system has eliminated a considerable amount of management legwork for Alaimo and his team. “The Epiphan Edge has made things so much easier for my staff. They go out, they install one of the boxes, they contact the administrator, and we're up and running and on the cloud in under seven minutes. My team doesn't have to run around and check rooms to see if they're working; we just look at the Edge and it tells us if it's working or not.”
“Epiphan Edge has really revitalized how we manage the devices in our fleet,” Borts elaborated. “We used to have to focus on one device at a time, but we can now monitor all of them. We can see previews of every video stream, and we can send presets and update firmware in bulk.”
The Right People, The Right Product
While the Epiphan Video installation has been wildly successful for UNLV, Alaimo was careful to emphasize the importance of engaging in the right AV partnerships for the unique lecture capture needs of your institution: “The advice I would give other colleges and universities when it comes to selecting hardware for your classrooms is to partner with a good manufacturer, partner with good people, and partner with a good product that you can trust.”
As for the end users at UNLV, all those “good” boxes have officially been checked with Pearl Nexus. Student Safiyya Bintali said, “Just knowing that a lecture is recorded—I can be present and engage in class. If I don't understand something 100 percent, I can always go back and review that online. It's definitely had a positive effect on both my learning and my grades.”
This sentiment is shared by faculty members. In addition to helping their pupils who, for whatever reason, may need to miss class, Pearl Nexus frees up time for professors to provide more targeted help to struggling students. Debra Biordi-Fusaro, lecturer in accounting said, “Post-pandemic, students now demand lecture capture, where before it really wasn’t all that prevalent. They love being able to go back and study for quizzes or exams, or if they miss a class it’s always there waiting for them. It has also made a significant difference in after-class office hours. Instead of asking me to reteach a whole lecture, students can watch the lecture, then I tell them to come to see me and give more specific, concise questions on the subject matter at heart.”
All In on Innovation
One might be tempted to think that due to the added layer of modern convenience provided by lecture capture—in-person classroom engagement would suffer. But in fact, the inverse has proven true at UNLV since the adoption of Pearl Nexus: Engagement, attendance, and retention have all markedly improved.
Alaimo explained, “Learning has changed. Students can now watch classes on a phone, on an iPad, or on their lunch break while they're at work. It's no longer just four walls in a room with a lectern; it’s mobile. Despite this, our faculty have found that students are actually going to class more regularly with access to lecture capture. They're taking videos and watching them again at home—not watching them in place of going to class. They're picking up on the spots that they might have missed, or might not have understood in class.”
UNLV is the first school to fully standardize on Pearl Nexus—further cementing their status as a classroom technology trailblazer—and they’re not done yet. “As part of the digital transformation here at UNLV, Epiphan has helped us immensely with our lecture capture and I can't wait to see what happens in the future,” Alaimo concluded. “When it comes to Epiphan and the Pearl Nexus, we’re all in.”
