TelePresence: Overcoming the Limitations of Traditional Video- and Audio Conferencing
Hear Directly from Schools, Colleges and Universities Using TelePresence Over NLR: How TelePresence Expands Curriculum Options and Creates New International Collaboration and Professional Development Opportunities
Jeff Billings, Director of Information Technology, Paradise Valley Unified School District (PVUSD) Arizona
"Our mission is 'Cultivating world-class thinkers,' and TelePresence on National LambdaRail (NLR) provides a high-fidelity method of connecting our students, educators and community to some of the best minds and institutions in the world. They are, quite simply, on NLR and have been earnest in integrating the emerging technology of TelePresence in order to communicate, create and collaborate with PVUSD. The connection quality of TelePresence on NLR elevates the human experience to instantly decipher facial expressions, humor, focus, body language, voice inflections, all for efficiently and effectively driving home a point, just as in face-to-face participation. PVUSD's expansion into a new form of online hybrid learning, what we call HyTel ©, allows us to leverage web-based technologies with the high quality, virtual face-to-face interaction of TelePresence, while eliminating the variable of geographical distance. The Research & Education (R&E) Exchange puts the power into the hands of the learners and the teachers, all through the touch of a button on a handset, connecting world-class universities and research institutions with their next-generation of world-class thinkers, our students."
Tom Collins, Manager, Network Infrastructure, Madison Area Technical College
"Madison Area Technical College serves over 44,000 full- and part-time students in a 12-county district in South Central Wisconsin, surrounding Madison, Wisconsin. Cisco TelePresence over National LambdaRail is an integral part of our strategy to leverage cutting-edge technologies to help deliver on our mission of a high-quality, highly interactive and flexible curriculum that's accessible and affordable. With TelePresence we're able to hire top-notch instructors and have them physically in a classroom at any of our district locations, while students in any of our four Madison sites or four regional campuses can join in via TelePresence, as if they were sitting across the same conference table. We're planning on using TelePresence as a way to "shrink the planet", allowing students opportunities to collaborate across borders and across cultures. Leveraging the growing number of international colleges and universities with TelePresence on the National LambdaRail network will give students direct exposure to non-US instructors, practitioners and counterparts, for activities such as language immersion courses, internship and job interviews with alumni, helping to speed up the get-acquainted process across physical distances in order to better prepare them for success in the global marketplace."
Tracy Futhey, CIO and VP of Information Technology, Duke University
"Duke has a long-standing commitment to globalization—putting our students out into the world community to broaden their experience, and bringing people from around the world back to Durham to enrich the diversity of discourse in the classroom. TelePresence is emerging as an essential enabling technology, allowing us to extend our teaching and learning environment to distant locations and connect classrooms around the globe more efficiently than through physical travel and more effectively than through teleconference or even standard videoconference technologies. We believe TelePresence is going to take the impact of our programs to a new level."
Joy R. Hughes, Vice President, IT, and CIO, George Mason University
"It's more important than ever for universities to develop global relationships, in order to educate our students for the world they will live in and also to explore potential, new revenue sources. At George Mason University, we've found TelePresence to be extremely useful for developing our close partnerships in China, for instance, where we're working with the Chinese Ministry of Education and Virginia's Department of Commerce on a program to help educate smaller U.S. businesses on engaging in China, logistically and culturally. Unlike traditional technology tools such as audio or video conferencing or email, TelePresence offers a face-to-face quality that makes you feel as if you are in the same room, sitting across the same table, holding a conversation. The body language you can appreciate with TelePresence adds to the communication and trust and there is group member parity and responsiveness – an important cultural element in many countries."
Jozef Janitor, Computer Networks Laboratory, Technical University of Kosice, Slovakia
The Technical University of Kosice (TUKE) is the 3rd biggest university in Slovakia with more than 16,000 students and about 900 full-time teachers and researchers. It's located in the heart of Europe - in Central Europe.
In total, the students and employees are studying and working at 9 faculties:
- Faculty of Mining, Ecology, Process Control and Geotechnology
- Faculty of Metallurgy
- Faculty of Mechanical Engineering
- Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Informatics
- Faculty of Civil Engineering
- Faculty of Economics
- Faculty of Manufacturing Technologies
- Faculty of Arts
- Faculty of Aeronautics
Staring from the late 90's, TUKE has been operating a Regional Cisco Networking Academy (RCNA) and Computer Networks Laboratory (CNL) at Department of Computers and Informatics (DCI) at Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Informatics (FEEI). Together with the RCNA and CNL, TUKE has been involved in several innovative projects around emerging communication technologies. TUKE has been working with the California Institute of Technology (CALTECH) on a development of the EVO (formerly VRVS) multipoint videoconferencing system and has played a key role in VoIP development in Slovak educational networks. TUKE was the very first university to deploy and use VoIP and IP Telephony based on Cisco AVVID technology in Slovakia.
Based on experiences from this background, the next step was obvious: TelePresence – a technology that truly brings people together, face-to-face to one table, with emotions, body language, while they can be located anywhere on the world.
TUKE, with several other universities from Slovakia, have decided to create a TelePresence network and thus develop a communication infrastructure, that will bring teachers, researchers, students and other people together, to one round table, to communicate face-to-face. Based on real "hands-on" experiences from Cisco showrooms, it was clear that only Cisco can deliver it.
The vision of TUKE with Cisco TelePresence is clear: now we have a technology that will speed up collaboration and communication. There will be less time spent with travelling, while more face-to-face meetings will take place. Cisco TelePresence will change the way we communicate in the same way, as email did one decade ago and NLR will open up previously not possible opportunities for communication and collaboration with universities and colleges in the U.S."