Costa Rica: 3 Colleges, One Class-Education

Three public technical colleges in three different towns now teach the same lesson at the same hour, with nobody operating a camera.

The challenge

Costa Rica's Colegios Técnicos Profesionales run a national curriculum in towns that sit hours apart. Specialist teachers are concentrated on the larger campuses, so the smaller sites lose subjects first, and a teacher who spends a day travelling between colleges spends that day not teaching. The Ministry wanted the three colleges — Ulioa, Sanabria and Nataniel — to behave like one institution: the same class, the same resources, the same opportunities, without asking teachers to run a production desk and without asking students to travel.

What Reach deployed

Each campus received an iClassroom room. A camera on a motorised head follows the teacher by face recognition, a switching engine decides which picture is live — teacher close-up, podium, students, students' close-up, or blackboard and PC content — and the lesson records itself while it is taught. The three rooms are joined over a VPN to the MEP server room, which holds the recording and streaming server and the video-conferencing platform. Reach and HUAWEI delivered the system together and support it together.

How it works

1. The teacher starts the class. Tracking, switching and recording begin on their own; there is no operator and no extra device to wear.
2. The switching engine cuts between five picture sources as the lesson moves — the teacher, the podium, the students, a student answering, and the board or PC content.
3. The stream reaches the other two campuses over the VPN, where classes follow live and put questions back through the conference link.
4. The recording is published to the portal. A student who missed the class, or wants to revise, opens the same lesson rather than borrowing notes.

Outcome

• A specialist teacher now covers three colleges in one lesson instead of one.
• No cameraman, no technician and no editing step — the class is complete when the bell rings.
• The link tolerates packet loss and delay, so HD video survives a modest rural connection.
• Every lesson stays available on the portal for revision and for students who could not attend.