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Education
Montgomery County
Community College: Growing With the Needs of the Community
Montgomery
County Community College (MCCC) prides itself on being a place “where
the future is created – a place where desire and knowledge are combined
to yield opportunity.” This year marks the college’s 40th
year of fulfilling that mission at both its Central Campus in Blue Bell,
Pennsylvania, and its West Campus in Pottstown.
Throughout
its history, MCCC has found innovative ways to address communication
needs. Serving the community in the twenty-first century requires
sophisticated communications for this institution. When MCCC began
exploring
digital signage solutions that would balance the communication needs of
faculty and students with the budget of a community college – AxisTV
became the clear choice.
Michael Knight, Manager
of Multimedia Services, examined several messaging systems and chose
AxisTV as the best candidate to meet and grow with the college’s digital
communications delivery needs. Knight explains, “We’re a small team and
we like to keep integration in-house. Visix provided us with a system that
met our needs in terms of communications delivery, ease of
implementation and budget.”
Knight has managed the
AxisTV system since MCCC implemented the technology in 2003, when Visix
delivered a v.3 Connect System. The college started with one channel
player delivering content to a series of 36” computer monitors
repurposed as digital signs.
“AxisTV
has made it a lot simpler to disseminate information to our students. As
opposed to email blasts that get lost in the clutter, the information is
right there for all to view. You see people stopping to look at the
screens all the time. The best part is the immediacy of it,” says
Knight.
Over the years,
AxisTV has provided MCCC the flexibility to grow its visual
communications initiative. Originally, the college wanted to deliver
event schedules using Astra Schedule® from Ad Astra and message content
to multiple endpoints. At one time, the output was being delivered not
only to monitor displays, but also encoded as a stream and delivered out
over their local area network.
The system has developed
to include seven channel players delivering content to two campuses and
over twenty displays which are being upgraded to plasmas over the next
six months. MCCC recently upgraded from the older Connect System to
AxisTV Professional and plans to install a video display wall to feature
AxisTV messages.
MCCC continues to rely on AxisTV’s event schedule display to
import daily class schedules from Astra using an automatic text adaptor
to capture event data and format the information into viewable
bulletins. They are also using the Screen Saver Option to deliver
content to public PCs in lobbies, hallways and libraries. The college is
improving its creative delivery by migrating from a single content pane
to a three-pane plus two-crawl format that looks more like cable news.
Knight is excited
about the new Display Device Control option installed to remotely
control their plasmas. “In the past, we had to physically make our
rounds to turn displays on or off in multiple buildings and campuses.
Now I’ll be able to turn displays on and off via the Web.” This is
particularly valuable with the two campuses being thirty-five miles
apart.
Along
with growing the hardware and AxisTV infrastructure, MCCC is
concentrating on fine-tuning their communications procedures. Policies
have been implemented to ensure users can create relevant content
quickly, with faculty creating their own course advertisements and
student groups submitting bulletins for approval through established
channels. Designated multimedia staff members post emergency notices,
using the “alert” mode available in AxisTV when such notices are
necessary. Knight continues, “It’s the beauty of a self-service system.
The user does it (bulletin creation) themselves. It cuts down on time
for them and for my staff, in terms of moving from an idea to the
delivery of information.”
Montgomery County Community College and AxisTV will continue to grow
together to meet the needs of faculty, students, administrators and the
IT staff. Knight concludes, “I’m very happy with the system and the
service. If I need support, I send an email and I get a call or an email
within two hours. I wish other vendors gave us that kind of service.”
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