Loughborough University, UK

Loughborough University is proud of its long history as an institution of further and higher education, and thanks to the vision of its founding father, Dr Herbert Schofield, it has grown and developed into one of the UK’s leading universities. It offers academic excellence in a wide range of disciplines, from sport and exercise science to engineering, business, and the arts, and it is top 7 in every national university league table in the UK. It was named University of the Year in 2019 by The Times and The Sunday Times newspapers, and is the first university to have received this award twice. Loughborough University has an international reputation for sporting excellence, including performance, facilities, expertise and working partnerships. In the 2016 Olympics, winning 12 medals, including 5 golds meant that if Loughborough University had been a country it would have been in 17th place on the medal table! A WolfVision customer for more than 12 years, Loughborough uses WolfVision Visualizers as a standard in 130 standard teaching spaces. Installed in classrooms of all sizes, including the new STEM laboratory, and in The School of Arts (where large format screens are used), around 200 WolfVision Visualizers are in daily use including VZ-8, VZ-8neo, VZ-3neo, and EYE-14 models. All installed Visualizer systems are also linked to Microsoft Teams to enhance the online remote, and hybrid teaching and learning experience. Simply using the Visualizer as a source enables ‘live’ on-screen content to be easily added to MS Teams sessions whenever it is required. Many of the installed Visualizers are mounted directly onto the lectern, and are used together with WolfVision dry-erase working surfaces, which in addition to allowing the display of physical materials, also facilitate high-quality display and capture of ‘live’ handwritten content. Recording of lectures plays an important part at Loughborough, and all Visualizer systems are also linked to the Panopto video platform, which The University uses for lecture capture and video management. The Visualizers are particularly popular for use in recordings where handwritten notes are displayed on-screen. With recordings made of virtually all lessons, Loughborough University currently makes around 55,000 lecture recordings per year, using dedicated hardware capture appliances. “The quality and build of WolfVision products is excellent, and in my experience, far exceeds any competitor products we have tested. We continually assess the market to see if alternatives are available, but WolfVision always stands out. Their Visualizer and Cynap products are intuitive to use, easy to setup, reliable and built to last. They are essential tools in our classrooms.” Aaron Turlington-Smith. AV Manager, Loughborough University Loughborough University has also standardized on Cynap Pure wireless presentation systems from WolfVision, with currently around 40 installed appliances. These are used for wireless BYOD presentations from smartphones, laptops, and tablets, primarily in the library, student study pods and other collaborative working areas. Cynap Pure’s ease of use and wireless BYOD connectivity has helped to significantly reduce maintenance calls and further installations are planned for other teaching spaces in the next few months. Looking to the future, with the current trend towards online and hybrid learning modality, as a Panopto user, the Cynap Core Pro with its Panopto compatible interface could be a possible solution as Loughborough explores ways to further improve the quality of its recorded content materials. The ability to add multi-source digital media, plus camera sources into lecture recordings could potentially provide the next step in further enhancing the teaching and learning experience for both face-to-face and remote lesson participants. WolfVision is extremely proud to play an important supporting role in student education at Loughborough University, and looks forward to providing support and advice to this leading educational institution for many years to come.