The NEC projectors are used to make academic presentations and shared over multiple classrooms, making it easy for the staff and students at the American University of Kuwait (AUK) to share resources. The facilities are used by more than 100 faculty members on AUKs campus reaching out to more than 2200 students with the support of […]
The NEC projectors are used to make academic presentations and shared over multiple classrooms, making it easy for the staff and students at the American University of Kuwait (AUK) to share resources. The facilities are used by more than 100 faculty members on AUKs campus reaching out to more than 2200 students with the support of a two-member IT staff. AVPro Middle East takes a look at the AV installation.
The Challenge:
The American University of Kuwait (AUK) is an independent, private, equal-opportunity, liberal arts institution of higher education. Its educational, cultural, and administrative methods and standards are based on the American model of higher learning. As part of its continued efforts to provide the latest communications technology to facilitate video tools for all its classrooms and well as its faculty and common rooms, AUK floated a tender to provide video links across its campus. According to Rusty Bruns, director of IT at AUK, We found that students today responded better visually compared to previous generations and we felt that it was our responsibility in conjunction with faculty recommendations to provide the best possible learning environment.
The NEC solution
In keeping with its practices, AUK floated enquiries for projectors and display solutions as part of its overall project requirements. It was looking for projectors, monitoring and management software, network port for its existing NEC Projector, MT-1060, and the Lumens that met the needs of each classroom for professional looking presentations. NEC Display Solutions beat off all its main rivals in this field to win the project through its partner, Al Alamiah. The two companies worked with the IT team in AUK to understand the long term needs of the university and provide the right combination of products to meet these. AUK installed 34 MT1060, 41 LT380 and 1 NP2250 projectors from NEC. The project was implemented over two phases in the course of three years. Phase one saw the installation of more than 60 projectors in 2008 when the new (present) campus site was being set up. Since then the AUK has added new projectors and equipment almost every year and now have more than 65 projectors across all classrooms and common areas. The projectors were installed without the need for any training for AUKs IT staff but the team carried out in-depth training for its faculty to ensure that they were able to use the equipment without any problems or glitches.
The results
According to Bruns, NEC was selected because of several key factors: ease of use, price, quality, customer service and reliability. The projectors are now used to make academic presentations and often, these presentations and videos are shared over multiple classrooms, making it easy for the university to share resources. The facilities are used by more than 100 faculty members on AUKs campus reaching out to over 2200 students with the support of a two-member IT staff. Our professors can now bring the internet, videos or a live interview into the classroom for students to make the most from learning, added Bruns. We can now claim that we have optimised the learning environment and plan to continue our expansion in the New Year.
More pictures of the installation at
