Teleclassroom Tour (9:48)

Speaker: Paul Jewell, College of Engineering, Iowa State University
http://www.ede.iastate.edu

Hi, my name is Paul Jewell from College of Engineering, Iowa State University. My job here in the college is to work with faculty to digitally enhance their engineering curricula and make them to be delivered on the web, on line through distance education program. It starts at a class like this with three camera shots. Our goal is to provide distance education experiences the same educational experiences or the close experiences of on-campus students in class to off campus students. Now it happens here in real time on campus of Iowa State University.

You are now seeing me as presenter in camera one. If you look at camera two in the classroom, it is an over-head document camera that allows instructors to work their problem: put a text book down, put a map down, anything they bring in to display on this document camera. We encourage faculty to use this document camera as it has clearer presentation than the white board and their back would not turn to students. Also the papers can be canned and posted on the website for students to download.

Camera three is a window to our on-campus. Students’ interaction with instructor is important to capture because they moderate the instruction and they also bring into lights students’ perspectives. Students are required to use the microphones that are sitting on the desk. We use the local profile micros. If they have questions, they can push the bottom, then the camera will room at that student to record the question. No one will escape the camera in the classroom, but we try to keep it quite casual and just try to have fun here.

Our tele-classrooms have lots of visual technology, yet our approach here in the College of Engineering is not to encumber faculty with responsibility of controlling these technologies, but to teach them in a very natural way. So we use control room which is just on the other side of the wall. Here is Dan. Dan is controlling the cameras, controlling the transition, and controlling the video. Dan is an undergraduate student, senior, in electrical engineering. He works with us for two years. Thanks to him for helping this with us today!

We provide our instructors with many tools, and Dan takes the stress out of them dealing with what/when to show and how. Instructors have to interact with students in the classroom, so we give them lots of tools to interact with. Let’s go to the silver head camera shot to take a look at it. Here you can see me waving 20 seconds ago. This monitor is a confirmation to you that we are doing alive web cast, a confirmation to the instructor we are going out to the students. We are also doing quality control to make sure these prints are readable from here. At the right side is instructor’s PC. You can see it’s a Powerpoint slide here. Engineering faculties are working with lots of scientific software and lots of presentation software like Powerpoint. The monitor in the middle is to confirm the video quality. It also let the instructor know what is going on in this room. This little device here is our video animation tool. Thetool is nice because it gives a non-destructive way of writing notes on materials and the instructor can put to overhead camera for instance.

Now if we go back to camera three, I just want to show you this really quick. This is the robot camera head hanging from the ceiling and it’s robotically controlled. It can wave back and forth with joint sticks from the control room. You actually can see that moving around from the monitor. Yes, with three controlled cameras, there is lot of interaction in the classroom we can capture with three different camera views. Faculties are free to move about in the room as we put wireless microphones on them. They can walk over to the more open presentation area. We have another popular presentation tool called Smartboard. It’s an interactive projected PC screen. Instructors can interact with graphics. These animations are recorded. After the presentation, instructor can save the animated presentation, then we can post on website. Students can actually see what the animations were to help them study.

Now I am going to put Dan on the hook again. He is back there controlling technology. It will be interesting to see how that’s laid out. So Dan, you go ahead and explain what you are doing back there.

Hi, I am Dan Stealer, a senior electrical engineering student here in Iowa State University. I have been working with Engineering Distance Education for two years now. My job is basically to run these equipments and make the professors’ presentation go out clearly to all students off campus. I will start to explain the equipment on the left side of the panel. Right here is the Globe Caster. Basically it’s a TV studio in a box. The Globe Caster allows to switch video inputs. We can preview stuff, we can run stuff, we can switch stuff. Here with this equipment, we can switch to the program. Here is a group of things we can do: we can do a fireball or any kind of that thing, transition of preview program etc. If we move to the middle console, we have a mixer here. We have CD player to play for the opening sequences. We have a mixer for different microphone inputs: we have wire microphone from the classroom, wireless from the classroom, student microphone, computer volume, a phone thing you can call the class to ask questions. Move over to this side, we have equipment records. We have S-video decks. We have all these equipments over here sent over video to stream station. The stream station basically sends out all our videos and RealVideo files. It’s available, it’s alive webcast, and also are archived after class. They will be available for students to use 24/7. Now we go back to you Paul.

Thanks, Dan! That’s our tour today. Please visit our website at www.ede.iastate.edu, and you will learn more about our approaches to distance learning. A help center page on this website has some movies describe how we use our RealVideo streaming. The same streaming techniques you are looking at now. They also describe how we support students, classrooms and our technologies. We look forward to learning from you as well. Feel free to contact us any time. Thank you for joining us on this virtual tour! Bye-bye.