Hospital for Sick Children 'SickKids'
Centre for Research and Learning
Toronto, ON

The Hospital for Sick Children ('SickKids') located in Toronto, Ontario is Canada's most research intensive hospital and one of the world's largest and most respected pediatric academic health sciences centre. Children in every nation of the world have benefited from SickKids patient care innovations, preventative medicine practices and research discoveries.

To further its global leadership position in pediatric care, research and education, and to meet the requirements for more research and teaching facilities SickKids has expanded its Toronto campus with the addition of the new Research and Education Tower, completed in November of 2013.

The new Research and Education Tower will provide a new home for the Learning Institute with a variety of different teaching & learning facilities designed specifically to create pedagogically effective learning environments and equipped with the newest, state of the art education technology to allow the Learning Institute to connect with any partner institute across the globe.

To meet the very specific functional and performance requirements for the enterprise level AV systems Sickkids hired McSquared System Design Group as the AV consultant for the project.

The crown jewel of the new learning institute is the new 250-seat lecture theatre, equipped with state of the art, high-definition, videoconferencing based distance education capabilities.

The state of the art distance education enabled AV systems allows SickKids to connect digitally to any of its partner sites, anywhere in the world, Providing the participants at the partner sites with the ability to see and hear the instructor, to see and hear the audience, to see and hear any content played backed in high resolution from a computer, a document camera or any connected video playback device. Additionally, the 250 seats in the lecture theater are equipped with push-to talk microphones, giving the audience at all participating sites the opportunity to interact, just as if they were in the same room. The front of the lecture theatre accommodates three side by side high definition video screens displaying the participating connected sites and the teaching contents shared across the connected sites.

Careful consideration was given by the project design team to the special architectural, acoustical, lighting and layout requirements to create highly efficient teaching and learning spaces based on the most advanced pedagogical requirements.

The learning Institute also has two 59-seat seminar rooms, equipped with digital high definition, videoconferencing system for distance education capabilities. The AV systems in these classrooms makes use of three side-by-side 80" flat panel displays to provide all participants in the room with the ability see and read what is displayed on the screens. All of the distance education enabled teaching spaces are equipped with a lectern, equipped with all the required technology to permit the instructor to teach and communicate effectively with the local and the remote participants.

In addition to the distance education enabled lecture theaters and seminar rooms, the new building provides two 75-seat classrooms, with the ability to divide each of these rooms into two smaller rooms using a movable wall. The 75-seat classrooms are equipped with high definition videoconferencing and high resolution presentation capabilities for use by all SickKids departments with support provided by the staff of the SickKids Learning Institute.

A 120-seat Multipurpose room provides a suitable venue for a variety of functions, from teaching sessions, to presentations and social functions held at the new building.

Additionally, the new Research and Education Tower has over 15 meeting spaces, all equipped with presentation systems making use of the most advanced high resolution displays and collaboration tools to create highly interactive and effective meeting environments.

The use of distance education technology for teaching and presentation applications, plus videoconferencing and collaboration tools for research and meeting sessions, is not only part of the plan to further pediatric education and research, it is also part of SickKids plan to protect the environment and go green. The increased use of high definition collaboration technology assists SickKids in its goal to help protect the environment by reducing travel requirements, further reducing the SickKids carbon foot print.

One of the meeting rooms is dedicated as the Emergency Operations Centre (EOC) and is equipped with a fully integrated high definition videoconferencing system and collaboration capabilities allowing the Sickkids management to manage the any crisis situations from the EOC.

A centralized videoconferencing hosting and gateway system running on a dedicated VLAN provides the ability for scheduled auto VC dialing and secure firewall traversal allowing easy access to the public domain.