Notre Dame Making New Connections with

Portable Videoconferencing System

02/03/2005

By Kelly Kerney and James Cope

Every Wednesday, Notre Dame biology professor David Lodge, currently on sabbatical in California, returns to Notre Dame. He doesn't hop the "red eye" to O'Hare, though. Instead, Lodge joins several postdoctoral students through a videoconferencing link between his computer desktop on the west coast and a portable videoconferencing system in a room on the Notre Dame campus.

Lodge believes that, although he's committed to writing a book during his academic leave, being on sabbatical shouldn't mean leaving students behind. And his students, who gather around a new portable videoconferencing unit to discuss ongoing projects, feel the same way.

Interest in the portable videoconferencing system that the OIT's Educational Technologies and Services (ETS) unit introduced late last year has really taken off, according to ETS director, Molly Gordon. She says, "Participants can see, converse, and even share visual aids with groups in any institution that has access to similar equipment worldwide. And that includes most universities," she adds.

"With a set-up time of about fifteen minutes, the new system avoids the hassle of moving an entire class or meeting to one of the fixed videoconferencing rooms on campus," says Jeff Miller, OIT's manager of Academic Media Resources.

"Quality of the video and audio can depend on the connection," Miller says, but he notes it is generally very good. "And even with some quality limitations, it allows Notre Dame students, faculty, and staff to be involved real time in events that they might otherwise miss."

For example, Notre Dame English Department Chair Stephen Fredman employed the videoconferencing system to bring the symposium Secular Jewish Culture/Radical Poetic Practice to the Notre Dame campus last semester. The event, featuring a panel of prominent Jewish writers and poets in New York City , enabled Notre Dame students and faculty to participate in the conference in real time, making comments and asking questions via the videoconference connection.

In September, the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies used the videoconferencing system to enable Tariq Ramadan, the Islamic scholar hired by Notre Dame whose visa was revoked by the U.S. State Department, to interact with his class on campus from CERN in Switzerland . "This was a wonderful example of distance learning," says Julie Titone, director of communications for the Kroc Institute. "The students asked excellent questions, and the professor in Geneva gave thoughtful responses. There was lots of give-and-take," she adds.

Although Ramadan elected to resign his professorship because of the visa problems, "the videoconference gave at least one group of American students some exposure to his ideas," Titone concludes.

Biology professor Bill Evans, who joined Notre Dame from Texas A&M University , believes that embracing videoconferencing not only widens the field of academic resources and content available to the Notre Dame community, but also saves time and money. "In the past I have had the opportunity to have guest speakers for my class, but did not have the funds for airfare," Evans says. This [videoconferencing] capability adds many opportunities to bring in experts from remote locations with little expense."

In October, Evans was able to participate via videoconferencing in the oral exam of an A&M student who was finishing her Ph.D. after Evans had moved to South Bend.

And just recently, 19 students in a Notre Dame class on French culture taught by Assistant Professor Sebastien Dubreil connected to Ecole Nationale Superieure d'Electronique, Informatique & Radiocommunications de Bordeaux (ENSEIRB) in southwestern France via videoconference, using Internet2 and its associated European networks. ENSERIB (http://www.enseirb.fr) is an engineering school.

"Two American [Notre Dame] students will be paired with two French [ENSEIRB] students for.the semester," Dubriel explains. The students, he notes, "will have to negotiate how much of each language they want to speak and how much they want to correct each other."

> (related story) Portable Videoconferencing Driven by Needs of Academy