| Portable video conferencing opens Hurst Hall to the world BY MATT GETTY Hurst Hall has been busy lately. The campus’s oldest building recently hosted a discussion on NAFTA between Sue Headlee’s Washington Semester class and students in Mexico. The day before that it was the site of School of International Service (SIS) professor Akbar Ahmed’s presentation on Muslim leadership to students in Tennessee. SIS professor Michele Egan’s Politics of the EU class met with European Union ambassador John Bruton and students from a half dozen other universities there a week later. The key to all this activity is a roughly five-foot tall rolling cabinet in the office of James Lee, Center for Teaching Excellence associate director and SIS professor. Inside is a 40-inch monitor, a digital video camera, and small black box that compresses video for live conferencing over the Internet. “We can just roll it right into any classroom,” said Lee. “All we need is an IP connection.” Through that IP connection, CTE’s portable video conferencing unit has created some unique long-distance learning experiences. School of Communication professor Sarah Menke-Fish, for instance, has been using the unit to enable her Film and Video class to collaborate on documentaries with students in Mexico’s Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Studies. Students met in small groups via the video conferencing unit four times to discuss subjects for films on cultural differences between the two countries, which they will screen and compare at the end of the month. “There would be no way to do this project without this,” said Menke-Fish, noting that video-conferencing helps the students establish a rapport they couldn’t get with e-mail alone. For Headlee, CTE’s video conferencing unit shows students firsthand the difference between international politics and the
people those politics represent. “I take them to the Mexican Embassy, and they say NAFTA is wonderful,” she explained. “I take them to the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office, and they say NAFTA is wonderful . . . Then the students in Mexico say, ‘Our corn peasants have been destroyed, and why don’t you let our trucks through?’ So they get to see that difference for themselves. They get to experience it, and it opens up a discussion that wouldn’t be the same without that experience.” Though video conferencing is not new on campus, the portable unit, which CTE purchased in 2005, has made it more accessible and more affordable. Ward 1, the Wechsler Theatre, and several classrooms in the Washington College of Law are equipped for video conferencing, Lee acknowledged, but those rooms can be difficult to book and don’t provide the best setting for small group discussions. “I used to do it in Ward, but it’s so huge, and my students barely fill the front rows,” said Headlee. “This is much more intimate.” Because of its bulk, Lee only takes the unit beyond Hurst’s second floor for special requests, but even within those confines he noted that it can serve a variety of conference sizes. For solo presentations like SIS professor Ahmed’s recent talk to Vanderbilt University students, Lee uses his office; small to medium classes like Headlee’s and Egan’s use the Social Sciences Research lab; and Lee has also used a second floor conference room for dissertation defenses in which one or more dissertation committee members couldn’t be present. Using an IP connection, said Lee, also makes the video conferences much cheaper than the ISDN-based conferences in Ward 1.
ISDN, he explained, requires three telephone connections just to transmit video. “Think about making three long distance calls to Mexico at $100 an hour,” he said. “That starts to add up.” Lower costs equal higher usage. Last semester CTE hosted 14 video conferences with the unit, three more than in fall 2005. It has already surpassed that number this semester. With that kind of use, Lee estimated that the unit’s $15,000 price tag looks like a bargain. “If you calculate how much money we’ve saved on flights,” said Lee, “the system has already paid for itself.” Last semester alone, CTE calculated that if all of the video conferences were held in person, airfare for all the participants would have totaled $6,933. Though Lee admitted that comparison might seem a bit forced, at least one frequent user thought the unit provides a suitable substitute to an international flight. “The only other way I could do this, would be to take the kids to Mexico, but that’s just not realistic,” said Headlee. “This is the next best thing.” Faculty interested in setting up a video conference in Hurst Hall with CTE’s portable unit should contact Jim Lee at 885-2285. |
