IP Videoconferencing Applications at the U of Illinois

Campus Profiles

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IP video conferencing opens the door to a number of applications never before possible. For example, it is a lot easier and much more affordable to have guest speakers meet your class and engage your students over the network, or have more regular ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) meetings than otherwise possible. A number of CIC committee meetings use IP video conferencing. (CIC is the Big Ten-based Committee on Institutional Cooperation; UIC and UIUC are charter members.)

IP video conferencing can allow classes to meet periodically in cyberspace, to get to know one another, to exchange experiences, and to collaborate. Students taking distance learning courses can get together one-on-one or in groups, with or without instructor participation.

UIC professor Robert Bruegmann has been doing just that; he took one of his art history classes to several video conference meetings with students from University of Southern California, to share what they were learning: at UIC, the art history of old Chicago, and at USC, the art history of old Los Angeles.

This term, one of Professor Bruegmann’s classes is collaborating with a class in Washington University. Things don’t always run perfectly, but the students get to see or hear each other in real time, via video conferencing, and asynchronously, via Blackboard CourseInfo.

Another Web project that Professor Bruegmann contributes to is the Chicago Imagebase: http://www.uic.edu/depts/ahaa/imagebase/ which is a fascinating searchable database of visual documents relating to the built environment of the Chicago area.

As another example, consider Dr. Robert Folberg’s applications. Not new to videoconferencing, Dr. Folberg feels right at home teaching Pathology of the Eye from his lab in the UIC College of Medicine to students at the University of Chicago, Cornell University, University of Iowa, Indiana University, West Virginia University, and the University of Missouri-Columbia. And he is planning on extending the program to the Philippines and India.

Most of the video conferencing that Dr. Folberg does now is over IP, but sometimes when network bandwidth is not available at the other institution, he relies on ISDN-based video conferencing to deliver his highly interactive lectures.

At the heart of Dr. Folberg’s setup is a Polycom ViewStation 512 to which he connects a high-end microscope with an overlay pointer, a laptop computer, and an Elmo document camera. A small video switch enables him to quickly switch video sources between these peripherals and the Polycom’s built-in PTZ camera.

Downstate at Urbana, communication professor Noshir Contractor has been using IP video conferencing to teach distributed cooperative learning classes. One such class had a total of 42 students, physically located far away from each other, at UIUC, Purdue University, the University of Southern California, and the University of California, Santa Barbara. The class meets every week using one of the CIC MCUs housed at the Ohio State University.

These examples show that, when it comes to H.323 videoconferencing, the people and the hardware can be at distant locations. What happens behind the scenes is not important; what matters is the capability to have face-to-face communication, anytime, anywhere, and without huge telephone bills.

Comments are welcome; please send them
to Ed Garay, garay@uic.edu