AV/IT TEAM: Myles Pennington, director of Media Support Services
GOALS: Trinity Valley Community College is a public institution in Athens, Texas, with a total enrollment of 5,642 students and a student-faculty ratio of 16-to-1. The college offers a two-year associate degree and students can also earn degrees and certificates in 15 different fields.
Back when DVDs were still a common media source, Trinity Valley Community College added 140 Smart Rooms to facilitate simplified digital instruction. Fast forward to 2018, when Myles Pennington, TVCC director of media support services, was looking to upgrade these rooms to support current digital standards.
Pennington needed to find a way to meet instructor needs at a reasonable cost. For guidance, he reached out to TVCC reseller partner ProComputing. A big fan of ViewSonic products, their ProComputing rep suggested that Pennington look at ViewSonic ViewBoard interactive displays. Pennington was impressed and set up a demo for the college’s vice president of instruction and department chairs—all of whom were quickly blown away.
CHALLENGES: For this massive undertaking, Pennington and his team needed to source a state-of-the-art, yet cost-effective and easy-to-use display solution.
ViewSonic IFP8650 ViewBoard interactive flat panel displays, ViewSonic VPC25-W53-O1 slot-in PCs, ViewSonic VB-EBM-001 e-Box motorized mobile carts, ViewSonic 24-inch ID2455 touch displays
FINAL INSTALL/USER BENEFITS: From a fiscal perspective, the ViewSonic ViewBoard solution was a huge success for TVCC. And from an engagement perspective, according to Pennington, it has been equally successful. “Students were used to seeing this type of technology in their K-12 classrooms, and used to using touchscreen tech,” he said. “Before we upgraded to the ViewBoard displays, we would hear them ask why we didn’t have the latest technology. Now we do, and they love it. It’s essentially a giant Microsoft Surface and with it the instructors are engaging students more than ever before.”
Importantly, instructors find the ViewBoard solution just as easy to use as their legacy system, allowing them to simply walk into the room and pull up content. While some instructors use the ViewBoard to present notes and other basic content, Pennington said, power users leverage the many functions offered by the interactive displays.
“For example, they’ll access online software like MathLabs, display content from websites, show videos, or load learning apps related to their subject matter,” Pennington said. “Often, they’ll divide up the screen, with the complementary content on one side, their notes on the other. Plus, they can annotate on top of everything using the whiteboarding tools.”
The mobility of the solution allowed for easy resource sharing, and the college now uses the high-visibility 86-inch ViewSonic ViewBoard displays to facilitate more impactful meetings across several conference rooms.
“Never before have we had such a high level of display support for our conference rooms,” Pennington said. “The quality of our Zoom meetings has increased tremendously. No more washed-out images or need to connect a separate computer, and presenters can leave the lights on. We provide a wireless keyboard and mouse and presenters can connect to the ViewBoard PC wirelessly or use the integrated ViewSonic vCast to throw their content onto the big screen.”
From his team’s perspective, Pennington couldn’t be happier with the ViewSonic ViewBoard solution. Thrilled that it cost-effectively met their users’ needs, they are likewise pleased with the solution’s limited maintenance demands compared to the projector-based system. Pennington is currently working with TVCC’s network support services team to expand the use of the centralized management provided by the integrated ViewSonic Manager software.
“It is really awesome management software, and it will be useful to remotely power up units for pushing out Windows updates,” Pennington said. “If we didn’t have the centralized management, we would have to have Ethernet cables on all devices, which is expensive and less flexible.”
Responding to an ask from instructors who love using the ViewBoard display, but prefer to directly face their students, Pennington is currently piloting the ViewSonic 24-inch ID2455 touch display. “So far it’s been a huge hit. The 24-inch monitor is mounted on their podium, and everything the instructors do on it is displayed on the 86-inch ViewBoard,” Pennington said. “I suspect that many more instructors will want to implement this system.”
