Michigan’s Oakland Community College recently opened its ultramodern Culinary Studies Institute in a new three-story, 78,000-square-foot building on the Royal Oak campus. Throughout the facility, audiovisual technology plays a key role in hands-on learning that prepares students for careers in the food industry. Extron NAV Pro AV over IP distribution and switching underpins the building's extensive AV infrastructure. Over 100 NAV endpoints connect AV sources and displays in lobbies, lecture classrooms, demonstration classrooms, and teaching kitchens, as well as in public meeting spaces, restaurants, and cafes.
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“Demonstration classrooms and teaching kitchens are equipped for live-streaming so lessons can be shared, recorded, and archived," says Cindy Carbone, Dean of Communication, Arts and Humanities at Oakland Community College. "All of our spaces are connected, very much like our chefs are connected and our students are connected. Which brings effective teaching and learning together. We are literally wired for success.”
OCC leadership recognized that the legacy culinary studies teaching location at OCC’s Orchard Ridge campus was too small to handle the volume of students applying to attend classes there. They also recognized the Royal Oak campus was situated in a vibrant dining and entertainment mecca.
A decade of planning went into constructing a new home for the Culinary Studies Institute on OCC’s Royal Oak campus. Building design began in 2020. By fall 2025, construction was complete and the teaching kitchens opened to students. The new building is designed from the ground up with flexible and scalable audiovisual technology that supports learning and collaboration on every floor. Supporting these goals, Extron NAV Pro AV over IP routes every source to every destination over a dedicated 1 Gbps AV network that includes AES67 digital audio.
In teaching kitchens, NAV encoders deliver HDMI from overhead cameras and instructor laptops to the AV over IP network. Live demonstrations and lecture presentations appear on flat panel displays and projector screens fed by NAV scaling decoders. Wireless mics give instructors hands-free freedom to narrate demonstrations. Extron SoundField ceiling speakers driven by Extron NetPA power amplifiers allow instructors to be clearly heard amid busy kitchen clatter. The AV over IP network extends to public areas like Flex Zone meeting venues and the Seasoned Oak fine dining teaching restaurant, where flat panel displays, projection screens, and videowalls show meeting presentations, public messaging, and ambiance at every turn.
Instructors at the institute recognize that audiovisual teaching aids designed into the new building with help from Extron can give students clear views of cooking techniques. Whether observing lecture slides in classrooms, or live kitchen demonstrations, everyone has a clear view thanks to cameras, multiple screens, and streaming video over the Internet.
"This facility makes us more competitive," chef Doug Ganhs CEC, culinary department chairman and instructor, Oakland Community College. "We have the premier culinary teaching facility in Michigan. It’s cutting-edge and truly reflects the talent of our faculty and students. To have the best of the best equipment, all the bells and whistles, really allows us to show students where the industry is headed and is the wave of the future."
