Prairie View A&M near Houston, Texas partnered with TEKVOX to upgrade and standardize classrooms on the Main campus and the School of Nursing in the Houston Medical Center. Troxell Communications provided all equipment and installed a cost-effective solution that meets the needs of faculty across the technology-user spectrum.
Prairie View A&M has a rich history. Established in 1876, it was the first state-supported college in Texas for African Americans. Today, the college has 8,000 enrolled students, one-quarter of them graduate students.
The challenge for Prairie View was refitting numerous classrooms in need of upgrades and standardization of their academic technology. The rooms were heavy utilized by faculty whose technical expertise varied greatly. Any new system had to be both simple to use yet offer capabilities to meet the more complex needs of the ‘power users’ on campus. At the same time, with the fixed budget in mind, a new solution had to be not only cost effective but also avoid ongoing ancillary costs.
Demitris Cambric, Executive Director for Academic Technology, researched nearby Lone Star College implementation of the TEKVOX’s Drop-In A/V 81000 series classroom technology, a customized, factory-built complete A/V system delivered pre-programmed for a room’s specific use case.
Cambric made a trip to see the solution in place at Lone Star and subsequently launched pilot installations in four rooms at Prairie View A&M. After tweaking the pilot systems 40 additional rooms at the college were outfitted with TEKVOX’s Drop-In solution.
The new systems were a great fit for Prairie View A&M since they arrived completely customized and ready to go, which reduced initial set up time and eliminated ongoing programming expense.
Cambric was impressed with TEKVOX’s genuine curiosity about how the systems could meet the college’s specific goals and challenges. She noted that the difference in the TEKVOX team’s approach, compared to that of other AV vendors, was refreshing. Each room has its own dynamic, which required a flexible room-by-room approach to serve each room’s needs independently. “TEKVOX heard me,” he says. “The team was great and willing to support, adjust and do whatever we needed to do.”
Once the classrooms were outfitted with the new systems, the volume of support calls dropped from “fifteen a day to two per week,” Cambric reports reducing both time and costs for the university’s support staff.
Prairie View A&M’s long-term planning includes adoption of TekEnterprise, a software companion to the TEKVOX solution that supports proactive equipment error resolution and asset management with realtime status reports, maintenance automation, inventory management and more.
About TEKVOX
TEKVOX (http://www.tekvox.com) is a private Texas company offering unique A/V control technology that brings unprecedented affordability, capability and reliability to audio/visual applications in teaching, training, meeting and interactive collaboration. Applying state-of-the-art Internet of Things (IoT) and enterprise management (EMS) technologies, TEKVOX’s distributed, networked solutions dramatically change the cost of acquiring and operating A/V-rich facilities.
