New clasroom connections

The University’s newest and largest videoconferencing facility is enabling students in the Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics to meet and talk electronically with leading academic and business professionals. At the same time, they are spreading the word about UD’s technical acumen around the globe.

Located in Lerner Hall on the Newark campus, the electronically enhanced classroom allows professors and students the opportunity to become familiar with the latest high-tech teaching and communications equipment in an otherwise traditional academic setting.

The 70-plus-seat classroom is a cooperative venture involving the Lerner College dean’s office and Diane Ferry and Christine Kydd, associate professors of business administration. 

Kydd and Ferry have pursued the potential of videoconferencing resources as a teaching tool for more than a decade. They highlighted their findings during a presentation, “Using Video-Conferencing and Electronic Meeting Tools,” at the 2001 UD General Education Institute.

“Christine and I have researched videoconferencing and its applications in the academic and business world for the past 10 years,” Ferry says. “The technology just kept getting better, so we decided we wanted to install videoconferencing in Lerner Hall.”

The newly renovated classroom was designed and installed by Information Technologies-University Media Services, which operates the facility when it is being used for videoconferences and video-capture occurrences. Cutting-edge equipment available for student and faculty use includes special projection devices and a digital document camera.

“We wanted a state-of-the-art classroom where we could do some teleconferencing and capture classes online,” Linda Somers, a manager in the Lerner College, says. “We applied for and received a Unidel grant that enabled us to do this.”

For faculty, a favorite feature of the Lerner Hall videoconferencing room is the ability it gives them to connect with other faculty and business professionals on campus and around the world, Kathleen Troutman, an associate director in Information Technologies-University Media Services, says. Videoconferencing, defined as a two-way audio/video exchange between two or more locations in real time, has a wide variety of applications in the business world, she says.

“The room in Lerner Hall resembles the ITV [interactive television] studios in Pearson Hall,” Troutman says. “We can capture courses, lectures and presentations digitally on CDs and DVDs and on the web.”

A specially equipped control room adjacent to the classroom permits technicians from University Media Services to control the video and audio data for storage and/or transmission across the country. “A faculty member teaching a class just has to walk in and use the room,” Troutman says. “The technology puts multimedia tools right at the instructor’s fingertips.”

Among the tools that faculty and students find helpful, she says, are the room’s twin viewing screens and digital document cameras that negate the need for the standard pull-down screens found in traditional University classrooms.

“This allows the use of dual displays, such as instructor notes appearing side by side with required text or sample objects,” Troutman says. “Faculty members have remarked that the room is easy to use and that they are very excited about this.”

Because of the new facility’s multifunctional capabilities as videoconferencing center, ITV studio and general-purpose classroom, faculty are finding it the perfect place for students to meet and discuss career-related issues with experts and leaders in the world of business and finance, Kydd says.

She says the state-of-the-art technology allows faculty to integrate real-time interaction with business experts in the field and to collaborate with other academic institutions. 

“Videoconferencing has now become a routine experience in the world of business and academia,” she says. “We are looking forward to teaching students about the technology and giving them some experience with its use.”

 “During the last 10-15 years, there has been a turnaround in videoconferencing technology,” Ferry says. “Now, we hold joint seminars with students from Tezukayama University” in Nara City, Japan.

For Kydd, videoconferencing facilities afford a unique opportunity to create online courses where business people visit a classroom electronically or in person to discuss job-related issues and field questions from students.

“You can’t move around during a captured class, and you have to have a microphone,” she says. “This new technology addresses these issues. It also is a way of showcasing such facilities at UD to academic and business institutions around the world.”

The videoconferencing classroom also enhances programs such as the Sarajevo Graduate School of Business, a partnership between the Lerner College and the University of Sarajevo’s Faculty of Economics, which is offering Bosnia’s first MBA degree program, Somers says.

The new graduate business school in Sarajevo began operations in the fall of 2004, with instruction provided by a core of 10-12 members of the Lerner College faculty, with support from economics faculty at the University of Sarajevo and other faculty from the region. (See article in this section.)

“This facility will really be beneficial to the Sarajevo program because it will allow both parties to share their experiences,” Somers says. “We’d like to have more remote locations that we can reach with this kind of technology.”  

—Jerry Rhodes, AS ’04