Desktop Videoconferencing Linking Remote Campuses

Stephen Giles*
Monash University
sgiles@monash.edu.au

Amalgamation and growth in the Australian education sector, from post-Primary Schools through to Universities, has led to the development of large multi-campus organisations, with distance necessitating duplication of teaching on the separated campuses. Many strategies for distance presentation of teaching material are in the preliminary stages of introduction in Australia. These include the direct broadcast via satellite to multiple sites in the primary and secondary areas and the early trials of teleconferencing systems for teaching across campuses in the higher education area.

These systems will provide greater access to the subject material that might not be available locally, but do not address the needs of the learner outside of the formal class format. To address the problems of these separated learners and their educators, systems that can provide as near to the same environment as the local, face-to-face experience as possible are likely to be in demand.

Over recent years, the focus on videoconferencing systems in many areas of usage has shifted from the room-based systems to the desktop (the personal computer). It is these systems that may provide the high quality replacement for the local interaction that is not possible in this new educational environment.

Monash University is a large (41,000+ students) multi-campus university within the state of Victoria. When a new campus was being planned for development there was an opportunity to incorporate the latest available technologies to support the students in the learning process. Among the proposed technologies were:

. the presentation of many lectures via video conference . access to library materials via networked workstations . video-on-demand for access to the video library

An associated project was the installation of a microwave system supporting an ATM network connecting the major campus sites. Teleteaching across campuses was to be implemented over this network. The communications infrastructure was scheduled for a staged availability commencing February 1996.

The Desktop Videoconferencing Project

An additional project was implemented, to investigate the suitability of desktop systems as a high quality replacement for the face-to-face contact that will be less possible in this new environment. This involved the setting up of a multi-campus system consisting of a single machine in a readily accessible area at each of three campus sites participating in the trial.

Each system would consist of PictureTel PCS50 Desktop Videoconferencing hardware and accompanying software installed in a PC (486DX2/66 or above). The PictureTel hardware consists of camera, hands-free telephone, audio/video CODEC, graphics board (1024 x 768 x 256 colours) and ISDN interface to initially connect to the Telstra ISDN network. [ISDN services via the digital PABX where to be trialled during the project and eventually will replace the service provider communications link]

Since there is already movement of students from two of the selected campuses for attendance at classes at one campus, students that are already attending lectures at the remote campuses will participate in trials of the above systems where the scheduled tutorial sessions are conducted using the videoconferencing systems. Ad-hoc consultations between students and lecturers/tutors will also be conducted between the campuses using the systems.

Project AssessmentAll participants (staff and students) will be surveyed to ascertain their perception of improvement (if any) to their learning provided by these systems and any other areas (social, community, etc) in which there has been some improvement.

ResultsPreliminary results indicate that the systems do provide some improvement in communications between distant lecturers/tutors and students, although at this point in the project insufficient time has passed to see (or expect to see) measurable effects.