Like many rural school districts around the world, the educational systems in certain areas of the Netherlands are facing major challenges. Some areas are grappling with a growing teacher shortage, and simultaneously, a declining number of students due to population shifts to urban areas. Compulsory subjects are well-supported, but niche courses often lack the student numbers needed to justify offering them, leaving schools unable to make them viable to offer.
That changed in one rural district when teaching staff at three schools in the town of Sneek made the decision to find a new way to confront this challenge. Educators at RSG Magister Alvinus, Aeres VMBO, and CVO Bogerman schools wanted to find a way to share resources between the three schools without disrupting timetables, and without requiring students to travel to different campuses. “We were trying to work out how to bring together different groups of students from different schools into one large virtual classroom,” says Mart Mojet, STEM teacher at RSG Magister Alvinus. “From our experience during Covid, we knew we could teach using something like Zoom. However, it wasn’t a good experience for the teacher or the students. We all wanted something more immersive.”
The teachers envisioned a Virtual Campus with an immersive classroom design, one that could transform the traditional remote learning experience from a flat computer interaction into something that felt natural and connected for both students and teachers. What’s more, “We wanted technology, but without feeling the technology or being aware of the technology,” says Thorba Wierstra, Geography teacher and IT policy officer at Bogerman, one of the three schools in the Zuid-West Fryslân municipality. “We wanted to find new technology to use not because it’s technology, but because we wanted a better way for our students to learn, for us to be better teachers, and to make things possible that were not possible before.”
The teachers started talking to AV professionals about how to create what they envisioned: “We worked through a two-year process with plenty of false starts, as we kept running into the technical limitations of what is possible with modern AV equipment,” says Mojet. The first breakthrough came when the teachers began speaking to Rene Simmers, Business Development at NFGD Audiovisuals, who was able to understand the problem and knew the right technology to solve it.
The vision was for each of the three classrooms to be equipped with interconnected screens, all positioned relative to each room’s perspective, to give the feeling of one joined-up classroom for all. This setup would allow students to see their teacher and peers across multiple locations as if they were all in the same room, breaking down the barriers of physical distance and enabling students to collaborate and interact in real time. NFGD and the educators worked closely together to collaboratively explore how to create a sense of shared presence in a virtual environment. The final design relied on five screens in a classroom, their arrangement differing depending upon the teacher’s location. Two screens face the teacher at the left and right of on-site students, representing the positions of the other two classrooms and giving the instructor the ability to face the off-site students. The other screens are arranged such that the students also directly face the instructor, with their off-site classmates either to their left or right, just as in a traditional classroom. With this setup, all participants share the feeling of presence in one classroom, together.
To achieve the sense of location immersion, Shure ceiling microphones capture the sound in each location, while small AIDA point-of-view cameras capture the students from distinct locations at the proper physical angle, and Audac soundbars placed under each screen provide localized, directional sound. To deliver the immersive classroom experience with this structure, the layout critically needed to be supported by precise audio and video synchronisation and imperceptible latency. “One of the biggest issues that you could have with a video feed,” says Douwe Hummeling, IT support at Aeres VMBO, “is if there’s a single split second of delay, that could ruin the entire experience.”
This had been a long-term challenge for the project: real-time interaction through cameras, microphones, and screens had to be seamless and natural, especially over the distances between the schools in which each classroom was located. NFGD was challenged with delivering a system that could achieve a latency of under 4 milliseconds, the level of performance essential for maintaining the flow of conversation and collaboration in a classroom setting, where even slight delays can disrupt learning. For NFGD, the solution was obvious: Dante AV Ultra. “Dante AV Ultra was the right choice for this project for multiple reasons,” says Wim van Dijk, CEO at Netchange, the AVoIP specialist partner and distributor involved in the project. “The most important thing was the timing and the clocking. With Dante AV Ultra, you have one single point of reference where you can sync your audio and video, and you know that at the other end it is going to look really good.”
Dante AV Ultra, the high-fidelity video encoding developed by Audinate for sub-frame latency and visually lossless image quality, ensured natural, smooth, and perfectly synced communication between locations. Its precise synchronization of audio and video streams ensures that teachers’ voices and movements are perfectly aligned, regardless of the distance between locations. “This technology is magnificent because it’s in real time, so there’s no delay whatsoever,” says Hummeling. “It feels like you’re in one classroom together with everyone else, and it just feels normal. The whole goal of this entire operation is to make it feel as lifelike as we can. The technology is present, but it doesn’t feel as if it’s present.”
“As a teacher, I don’t want to be bothered with the solution; it just needs to work,” says Wierstra. This requirement meant that NFGD needed to design in simplicity for teachers to start and stop sessions with a single button press. “It needed to work with a single button press because the teachers didn’t want to worry about lots of different stages,” says Francois Hobma, CEO of NFGD Audiovisual. “We did that with the combination of different equipment and the knowledge and experience of our engineers.”
NFGD accomplished this thanks to an intuitive Q-SYS control interface powered by Dante Domain Manager. This software-based control hub secures devices, manages users, organizes rooms and functions, and runs Dante AV seamlessly over routed networks. “You don’t want your teacher to have to be an AV technician,” says NFGD’s Rene Simmers. “Dante Domain Manager was able to help us in this case because it’s connecting all kinds of systems and devices behind the scenes.” AV data is shared across the three sites via BOLIN D20H Dante AV Ultra encoders and decoders — all over a standard 1 Gbps network using Netgear switches — a complex, interconnected system of devices, data, and infrastructure that the instructors never have to learn.
With the Virtual Campus in place across all three schools and shared lessons regularly taking place, the project has been a complete success. “It was not possible to justify supporting a curriculum or paying a teacher when only five or six students signed up in a district,” said Wierstra. “Once we connected the schools and brought them together, we can now offer a smaller course, expand to 20 or more students, and have one teacher teaching all of them.” Its modular design allows for flexible configurations with adaptability to the needs of different educational institutions. The system’s scalability ensures that it can accommodate additional schools and classrooms without compromising performance or quality. This has attracted the attention of other schools in the area, with three more recently joining the network.
What’s more, NFGD designed this teacher-tested, classroom-proven solution to be repeatable, rather than just a one-off implementation. This makes it possible for other educational bodies to realise the benefits of broadening access to distant locations. With the interest the solution has already generated, there are certain to be more Virtual Campuses appearing across the Netherlands and farther afield.
