St. Louis Community College Modernizes Hundreds of Learning Spaces So Every Student Can Thrive

Situation

Since 1962, St. Louis Community College's (STLCC) mission has been to empower students, expand minds and change lives. It achieves this by providing accessible, career-focused programs that empower students to enter the workforce successfully. 

While the college's academics have upheld stringent accreditation standards, its campus technology infrastructure had fallen behind in providing the critical connections needed to deliver on its educational mission. Wi-Fi was unreliable. Classroom technology varied from room to room. Instructors often lost class time troubleshooting each room's setup, and IT faced added complexity supporting so many different configurations. Remote students were often disconnected from live instruction. STLCC couldn't support the type of learning experiences required as student and faculty expectations evolved.

Recognizing the need to modernize, STLCC embarked on a $450 million transformation initiative after voters approved Proposition R, which funded six new buildings and renovations across the college's four main campuses over roughly five years. Known as STLCC Transformed, the project set out to transform facilities and programming to improve the overall student experience, reduce the barriers to accessing higher education, and meet workforce demands in Missouri.

STLCC leadership turned to World Wide Technology to help it deliver on STLCC Transformed and build an infrastructure capable of delivering the same quality of instruction to every student, whether they learn on campus or online.

Hart Nelson, EdD, Chief Operating Officer at St. Louis Community College

By the numbers

How we did it

Modernizing hundreds of spaces across multiple locations is a challenge we've navigated with clients across financial services, retail, global enterprises and more. 

Here's how we did it for STLCC:

We took attendance before we took inventory

Before recommending a single device, platform or technology, we listened to the people who stand in these rooms every day. Nursing faculty described what a simulation lab has to feel like. Advanced manufacturing instructors described teaching across a robotics floor. IT described what it takes to support four campuses with a small team. Those conversations defined the desired business outcomes the technology needed to deliver.

We ran a practice exam before the final

We hosted STLCC leadership, IT staff and faculty at our headquarters first, so they could see the art of the possible with our own meeting room technology. From there, we ran a pilot across three room types built to mirror what STLCC would deploy campus-wide: a compact huddle room, a standard classroom and a larger space built for hybrid learning. Seeing a fully equipped space in operation let STLCC faculty test the equipment and provide feedback, and it allowed the IT team to understand exactly how it was built and how it should be maintained.

We made every room read from the same syllabus

We reduced hundreds of very different spaces, from lecture halls to dental clinics to greenhouses, into four common, repeatable room designs sharing one interface. The goal was consistency without losing flexibility: not every room was the same, but every room needed to feel familiar.

We built to the academic calendar, not the construction calendar

Semester dates do not change. Through our integration center, we coordinated procurement well ahead of installation to clear supply chain risk, coordinated deliveries around active construction sites and weather closures and staged equipment labeled by room so installers could work without interruption. 

We made sure the learning didn't stop with the students

We trained STLCC's campus IT leads, who in turn trained their peers across the district. The college now supports, configures and extends this environment itself, and is applying the same standard as it renovates its remaining legacy classrooms.

Karana Phillips, MEd, MS, Department Chair, Computer Information Technology, St. Louis Community College

Solution

We approached hundreds of highly varied spaces as one system rather than separate projects across campuses, reducing them to a small set of repeatable room designs and then engineering the network and the physical environment to support them.

To achieve this, WWT provided:

• One consistent, interoperable experience in every room. Every space runs the same technology with the same touch panel controls, so a faculty member who learns one room can teach in any room on any campus. STLCC runs on Microsoft Teams, and the Cisco endpoints we deployed also join Webex, Zoom and other platforms without changing how anyone uses the room.
• Camera and audio systems built for hybrid instruction. Presenter tracking follows an instructor across a lab floor, and microphones and speakers let remote students participate in the conversation rather than watch it.
• Core network and wireless modernization. We upgraded switching, routing and wireless coverage to carry the new video and data load, including specialized coverage for spaces such as the horticulture greenhouse.
• Supply chain and logistics services. We purchased, staged and drop-shipped equipment labeled by room to active construction sites, so installation crews never had to sort out what belonged where.
• Program management across four campuses. We coordinated technology delivery against five architects, five general contractors, four construction managers and six simultaneous building schedules.

Elizabeth Gassel Perkins, EdD, Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs, St. Louis Community College 

STLCC Transformed turned the college's vision for expanded access, modern facilities and workforce-aligned education into a campus-wide reality. As new buildings rose, learning spaces took shape and academic offerings expanded. STLCC saw enrollment increase by 32% and increased capacity in high-demand fields. Within that broader transformation, the technology modernization delivered measurable benefits for students, faculty and IT.

Outcomes and benefits

• Wider access for students whose lives do not fit a fixed schedule. Hybrid classrooms let students attend in person or join live from home, work or anywhere else, with full two-way participation.
• Stronger retention, progression and graduation. A student with a sick child or a flat tire no longer misses instruction. In nursing, where a single missed lecture can put a student behind for a term, faculty report that flexibility is often the difference between a student continuing and a student dropping out under the added cost and stress of extra semesters.
• Faculty confidence that carries into the classroom. Consistent rooms mean instructors can plan technology into a lesson instead of working around it. After the first building's rollout, STLCC made training mandatory; by the second building, the IT team reported next to no adoption problems.
• A lower support burden. Because every room runs the same system on one control plane, the help desk resolves most issues remotely. Configuration changes push to an entire building in less time than it would take a technician to walk there, and a failed component in one room no longer cancels a class.
• Delivered on time and under budget. The buildings were completed on time, and the overall project came in under budget.

Areas of expertise

An initiative of this scale is not a single discipline. It requires design, engineering, logistics and program leadership working as one team. Here's what we brought to our partnership with STLCC:

• Collaboration and unified communications
• Audiovisual design and engineering
• Digital and physical experience design
• Enterprise networking
• Wireless and mobility
• Physical security and access control enablement
• Supply chain and integration services
• Program and project management
• Lab testing and proof of concept
• Public sector and higher education advisory

How can we help you?

Standardizing hundreds of collaboration spaces across multiple locations sounds like a procurement exercise until you try it. STLCC IT senior project manager Vicky Morris put the real goal plainly: "The goal was never just installation. It was readiness." Every room had to work on day one, for every kind of user, in a building that had been a construction site weeks earlier. We help organizations design, deploy and support collaboration environments at that scale so you can:

• Give every location a consistent experience, so your people can walk into any room and work without training, tickets or troubleshooting.
• Connect in-person and remote participants as equals, rather than leaving remote attendees watching from the outside.
• Run any combination of meeting platforms and AV equipment as an interoperable system, customized for each space, instead of forcing your organization to rely on a single vendor.
• Deploy hundreds of spaces against fixed deadlines, with procurement, logistics and installation coordinated as a single program.