During this summer vacation, ITSC has made various enhancements on the A/V systems in the teaching venues.

Firstly, in order to bring a better learning experience to our Students, we have been working together with FMO to enhance six classrooms near Lift 25 and 26, namely classroom 2463, 2464, 2465, 2502, 2503 and 2504. These classrooms are now equipped with new digital A/V systems, and classrooms with higher student capacity (e.g. classroom 2464, 2465, 2502, 2503 and 2504), have dual projectors installed. Furthermore, the teaching wall of classroom 2503 has moved to the wider side of the room. This shortens the average distance between the students and teaching instructor, as well as providing teaching colleagues with a wider teaching wall for illustration and teaching.

Secondly, we are pleased to introduce the University’s second Blended Learning Classroom 4582 (Lift 27 & 28). This is a newly set up classroom, equipped with a total of 11 student discussion group tables, each with 6 seats, making a total capacity of 66 seats.

The new blended learning classroom is also equipped with 4-sided video projections. This enables students facing different directions to see easily at least one of the video projection screen, without turning around. The blended learning classroom is also equipped with two wireless microphones channels, making the presentation for both instructor and student much easier. Interested teaching colleagues may want to borrow the wireless microphones sets from our Service Desk.

To protect our environment and be sustainable, starting from this semester, all central teaching venues (including lecture theaters and classrooms) will be enhanced with environment friendly arrangements:

• When video projectors in the teaching venues are not connected with a valid video signal for 10 minutes, it will go into power-save mode and the projector lamp will temporarily turn off. This normally happens when the presentation PC is left with no user activities, or when the notebook source is selected; but a notebook video signal is not connected to the A/V system. To resume, all you need to do is to provide a valid video signal again and the projector lamp will automatically wake up (usually within a minute) and resume projection.
   
• The presentation PC in the lectern will honor power saving policies too. If the PC is left without any user activities for 30 minutes, the screen saver will be activated. If the PC has no further user activities for another 5 minutes, the video signal output of the PC will be turned off. This will trigger the projector power-safe as describe above, enabling further power savings.

These arrangements will help to conserve energy and to extend the life time of the projector lamp too. Although these power saving arrangements may cause a little inconvenience to teaching colleagues, e.g. to move the mouse or touch the keyboard once a while, we hope these extra efforts are acceptable and we could make a greener world together.

Apart from sustainability, we have also made some adjustments to the classrooms setup. From the usage statistics for the past two semesters, we have noticed the utilization of the Blu-ray player is very low. In order to keep the classroom A/V system setup simple, starting from this semester, we shall remove the Blu-ray player from the standard classroom equipment list. In case teaching colleagues still need a disc player for his/her class, we would be glad to add back the player in the requested teaching venue, which will normally take just one working day to complete.

If you are interested in knowing more about our A/V systems in the teaching venues, please watch out for our demo sessions “Getting Started on Classroom A/V systems”. Look forward to seeing you there!