Durham University

Summary

Durham University is a top 100 ranked University worldwide, is 7^th in the UK and boasts the 6^th best Business School in the world. With a mission to inspire the extraordinary and change the world through learning, Durham University delivers an exceptional education to over 21,000 students per year, with the support of over 4,000 staff.

Visavvi have been supporting Durham University to deliver exceptional student experiences for many years. This started with smaller projects, such as classroom refits, but as our partnership has grown, Visavvi have begun to support Durham University in completing more complex projects. This includes new build projects, such as the one at the Waterside building, the new home of Durham Universities Business School, which opened in 2024.

This state of the art premises was designed to deliver a world-class teaching and learning experience. The new Waterside building signifies a significant enhancement of the University’s facilities, enabling them to facilitate even more cutting-edge business research. Visavvi supported Durham University in the installation of Audio Visual (AV) equipment into 70 AV equipped spaces, including a lecture theatre, seminar spaces, a Harvard style lecture theatre and meeting rooms based on Microsoft Teams rooms.

Solution

SCC partnered with Sennheiser to deliver the audio systems into the new lecture theatres and teaching spaces. Durham University have been working with Sennheiser since 2012, when the frequency spectrum changes happened, which identified to Durham University that they need to make a significant investment to standardise microphone products into one provider. Initially, Durham purchased the G3 range and overtime, as the University has grown and technology has advanced, they are now upgrading their teaching spaces to utilise beamforming technology. This includes the Team Connect Ceiling 2 microphones, which are used for lecture capture, hybrid audio and voice reinforcement.

In addition to these, the University use a lot of the speech line radio microphones, like the handheld and lapels ain their teaching spacing. The biggest benefit of the Sennheiser Microphone range to the University is the ease of use. “Users can walk into a room, pick up a handheld mic or lapel and its good to go, once they are finished they pop it back into the charger and its good for the next user. For the ceiling mics, users walk into a room and it just works, they don’t need to touch anything, it picks them up for lecture capture, hearing assistance and hybrid audio.” – Chris Pearson, Senior Manager (AV & IT Installations) at Durham University.

Durham University use Sennheiser Control Cockpit to manage their microphone estate, which provides information, such as battery life, connection status and signal strength. Chris Pearson, Senior Manager (AV & IT Installations) at the university, talks about the ease of managing the microphone estate: “From a support team point of view, my teams have very little to actually do day in, day out with the Sennheiser products because we put them in install and rarely have to return to them, which in itself, as an AV manager, is great because you don’t need to spend any time, energy or money on replacing these regularly.”

Durham University need to be able to capture great audio for lecture capture to support students who rely on it to review past lectures, catch up when they miss a lecture or to help with revision. “The team connects make a huge difference, the quality of the audio we get from it is just so much better than we had previously. We get some good feedback on that actually, they (students) can hear clearly, they can hear the people talking, they can understand the questions. If questions are asked in the room, they’re able to review that and hear the answers. It makes a huge difference to students and teaching staff.” – Chris Pearson, Senior Manager (AV & IT Installations) at Durham University.