Extron AV technology has been installed throughout a new Culinary Studies Institute at Oakland Community College (OCC) in Royal Oak, Michigan, making it one of the most comprehensively equipped culinary teaching facilities in the American Midwest.
The three-storey, 78,000sqft building houses four teaching kitchens, two demonstration classrooms, three lecture classrooms, two flex zones and a student-operated fine dining restaurant. More than 100 NAV AVoIP endpoints connect the spaces across four AV LANs running through seven Ethernet switches, tied into the campus enterprise network backbone. The system routes every source to every destination over a dedicated 1 Gbps AV network with AES67 digital audio.
Teaching kitchens are equipped with PTZ cameras and 50in flat panel displays, with NAV E 201 D wallplate encoders feeding camera and laptop HDMI content into the AV over IP network, and NAV SD 101 scaling decoders delivering video to displays. The number of cameras varies by kitchen configuration, ranging from one PTZ camera and three displays in the smallest space to nine PTZ cameras and four displays in the largest. Instructors use head-worn wireless microphones, with audio processed through DMP 64 Plus DSP processors and amplified by NetPA U 1002 power amplifiers driving SF 26CT SoundField ceiling speakers.
Lecture classrooms use an IN1804 four-input scaling switcher to select between a desktop PC, laptop and document camera, routing content through a NAV E 101 encoder to the network and out to a projector. Demonstration classrooms mirror the teaching kitchen setup at smaller scale, each with two PTZ cameras, four displays and an identical wireless audio chain.
The Seasoned Oak Restaurant on the third floor is equipped with a projector, motorised screen and pendant speakers, with wireless and wired microphone options and Bluetooth connectivity. Flex zones on the second and third floors provide collaboration spaces with retractable ceiling-mounted projectors or flat panel displays and multiple laptop inputs.
Six SMP 111 streaming media processors connect to the AVoIP network, each capable of simultaneously recording and streaming content from any source endpoint. Lesson material is delivered to remote students live via Zoom and on-demand through the college’s Brightspace content management platform. AV system control is handled by three IPCP Pro 250 xi control processors, with TouchLink Pro touchpanels in classrooms and flex zones, and wireless tablets used in the teaching kitchens.
The project was designed and installed by National Communications Corporation, working alongside Detroit architectural firm HED.
Greg Stroker, member of the culinary faculty at Oakland Community College, said: “The integration of audiovisual technology is a huge advantage. It gives us tools to advance our teaching and learning – the potential is phenomenal. With this technology, we can record, archive and share lessons in ways that make teaching and learning more effective.”
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