Background
Opened in 2015 by The Queen, the University of Surrey’s new £45 million School of Veterinary Medicine offers students a world-class facility, with state-of-the-art clinical, pathological, teaching, research and diagnostic laboratories and skills centres. Growing in recognition as a leading veterinary medicine and science institution, The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide 2016 has already ranked it as provider of the top veterinary biosciences degree in the UK.
The challenge
The quality and offerings of educational facilities play an important role in the decision that young students make when considering which university to attend, especially for highly specialised programmes like veterinary medicine. With the increasing integration of technology into universities, students have high expectations when it comes to accessing high-quality content that is tailored to their curriculum requirements and will best equip them for professional life.
With half of the world’s top ten veterinary science schools located in the United Kingdom, competition is fierce, and technology plays a crucial role in the students’ choice, as well as the quality of the course material. To ensure that it could offer tailored video services in the Veterinary Pathology Centre, the University of Surrey decided to extend its collaboration with VITEC (originally Exterity, acquired by VITEC in 2021) , which already equips the Surrey Sports Park.
The solution
The School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Surrey worked with VITEC to deploy a large-scale IP video system to give veterinary students access to high-quality live streams and recorded videos of dissection lectures. Nine encoders and fifteen screens were installed to transmit IP video across the school’s facilities, enabling the University’s AV team to transmit live footage of dissection sessions in the Veterinary Pathology Centre to two lecture theatres for viewing by up to 250 students at a time. The sessions are also recorded on the university's server for students to access and refer to in their own time.
On working with VITEC, Simon Loder, Senior Media Systems Analyst at the University of Surrey, said: “VITEC has a proven track record of delivering large-scale, high quality and future-proofed video systems. The University’s Surrey Sports Park was the first facility on campus to work with VITEC, and it went so well that the decision to work with them again to enhance the School of Veterinary Medicine was a logical one. Observing and learning from live dissections is an essential component to veterinary education on our campus, so being able to offer our current and prospective students access to live and recorded footage is paramount for us. The nature of a pathology environment also brings complications regarding access and, at times, hazard-containment, so by using VITEC solutions we are able to give students access to material that they would not normally be able to see. The VITEC deployment has been a big success and we look forward to continuing working with them in the future as we prepare to grow our student enrolment over the coming years.”
Results
The VITEC system deployed across the School of Veterinary Medicine delivers live and recorded videos of livestock, equines, exotics and companion animal dissections and lectures to its BSc, MSc and PhD students. It enables more students to safely observe and learn from these dissections, live or recorded through the school server for later reference. The university already plans to extend the system to offer video recordings of more courses, accessible via a Video on Demand (VOD) portal across the university campus, beyond the School of Veterinary Medicine.
