Education

As higher education institutions seek to attract and retain students, digital networked audio solutions enabling easy collaboration and learning will be huge differentiators. This guide aims to navigate you through the essential elements of an effective audio conferencing ecosystem that support teachers and students.

Flexible digital signal processing (DSP) in these different environments is essential, as it helps to remove unwanted noise and echo and improves the audio quality and intelligibility of the talker’s voice that is being sent to a live stream or recording.

A single supplier audio ecosystem establishes the vendor relationship that IT leaders in Higher Education are looking for to meet as many audio conferencing scenarios as possible.

There has been a huge disruption in the way the Higher Education sector delivers learning. High-quality audio is essential to these new methods of learning.

Quickly installed remote collaboration tools have connected employees working from home with each and with their office-based colleagues. For some, this has been a matter of survival. Now, however, the focus is turning to business resilience.

The education sector has been hit hard by the global coronavirus pandemic. Colleges, universities, schools and training establishments sent students home. Lessons were delivered via online modules and virtual collaboration tools. Throughout the lockdown, teachers and lecturers used videoconferencing solutions more suited to social interaction than to delivering learning. 

Digital transformation is shifting more endpoints to the enterprise network, and IT responsibilities are shifting with them.

“We’re constantly having to repeat ourselves on conference calls.”

“The client complained about background noise.”

“I listened to the recording and all I could hear was the sound of shuffling paper.”

Sound familiar? The IT department is often the first to hear when users feel that the conference system isn’t up to scratch. Sometimes a new A/V system is the answer. But it isn’t always.  

58% of respondents to an independent survey of IT professionals said their corporate networking infrastructure is either falling short of requirements or will fall short soon. So, at some point in the near future you'll likely need to review and plan your framework. 

For those of us in IT or the networking business, the term ‘audio networking’ most likely brings to mind IP telephony, plus Skype, Webex, Zoom and all the other voice-enabled software out there. This isn’t surprising given the focus on unified comms and collaboration over the past few years – and the pain it often caused in the days before Gigabit Ethernet!