Virtual classrooms on the way in the Inland Northwest

From the Experimental Nuclear Reactor at Kansas State University to the Flubberworm pit at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, appropriate laboratories are deemed essential to education, research and development.

Steve Simmons
Special to The Spokesman-Review

Here in the Inland Northwest, we have just gotten, via the new VP Net donated by Avista Corp. and Columbia Fiber Solutions, a high-performance networking laboratory of vast size and capability.

This new asset will complete the picture for the growing Computer Networking Technology Cluster in this region. It will add greatly to what is already operational — many expert network scientists at regional universities, the network technology coordination work of Catherine Goodwin at SIRTI, and many regional private companies involved in aspects of network development. These include World Wide Packets, Cisco, Qwest, Alcatel, Advanced Hardware Architecture, XN Technologies, Telect, F5 Networks, Zero dB, and more.

This month, a small group of researchers from Eastern Washington University and Whitworth College will make plans to launch the first major experiment for this new regional "lab" — joining a worldwide quest for the creation of a new high-tech methodology for electronic distance education. Initially, this research team includes EWU computer science professors Atsushi Inoue, John Shovic, Richard Steele and myself, as well as Ken Pecka, director of instructional resources at Whitworth.

Electronic distance education has come a long way from its crude first generation — in which videotapes and workbooks traveled slowly back and forth in the U.S. mail. Real-time television interaction superceded mailed tapes, followed decades later by interactions over the Internet.

However, as many experienced professors (and students) will tell you, the time and place flexibility of these second- and third-generation distance-learning technologies is purchased at a serious price in educational quality.

At the heart of the current worldwide effort to invent a more ideal approach to distance learning (a fourth generation, or 4G-DL) is the fusion of two burgeoning technologies: high-performance audio and video devices to create special rooms for interactions, and formidable bandwidth, carried over fiber optics, to transport the richness of the interactions to distant locations.

The ultimate goal is simple and completely non-technological: to dissolve the barrier of geographical location to unite two distant university classes within the same "virtual" room in a completely natural and transparent way. In the 4G-DL vision, the final result will be that two smaller classrooms will be united seamlessly into one. It will be as if there is a full-size "glass wall" joining the two rooms, floor to ceiling, so that all sounds can be heard clearly, all sights can be seen sharply, and only the senses of touch, taste and smell will be missing.

In the video technology world, this effect is called immersion — and 4G-DL ambitions for immersion are very high.

Yet, the EWU-Whitworth team’s aspirations go much higher than immersive multimedia technology. The more difficult technical challenge is in the area of operations. The team also wants to make this 4G-DL system operate without the deep costs in time and money characteristic of the current electronic technologies for distance learning.

No expensive human operators will be needed to aim cameras, adjust sound levels, and so on — this will be done by "automatic pilot." And no elaborate training will be needed to use these new, extremely high-tech class interaction centers. Any professor — from the arts, history, journalism, life science, etc. — will simply be able to ` walk in and teach’ in a natural way, just as in the most ordinary chalk-and-slate classroom in the oldest building on campus.

Any why stop there! Professors today have become accustomed to digital extensions of ordinary classroom techniques, such as the use of document cameras, computer displays, computer graphics animations, scientific visualizations and many more. So the team aspires to have the flexibility to support all these as well in the new interaction centers.

But (as Thomas Edison would have said if he’d worked the Borscht Belt), "Aspirations, shmaspirations — inventions are 1 percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration!"

What makes our team believe we can really do the job? The answer, in brief, is resources and momentum.

Resources are good. There is net expertise at eight regional universities, nearby state and federal labs, and dozens of private companies. And now: the ideal developmental capabilities of VP Net.

Momentum is good. In the role of an immediate 4G-DL project launchpad, there is the federally sponsored Access Grid project from Argonne National Laboratory, which is now a proven success in high-tech video conferencing, with 142 sites worldwide. Some sites are as far as Singapore, some as near as University of Idaho and PNNL.

The Access Grid project was developed to permit scientists working on supercomputing, and other advanced scientific applications, to collaborate in a full human sense — seeing and hearing each other as though they were in the same room. This is achieved by the transmission of four high-quality video channels and one high-quality audio channel over a high bandwidth network. The special rooms involved are called Access Grid Nodes, and consist of life-size projected video display zones covering at least one large wall, together with video cameras, microphones, speakers and network equipment.

This setup differs only in scale from the EWU-Whitworth team’s vision, which extends the multimedia immersion from four to 10 life-size display zones (covering all four walls of the room) and extends the single audio channel to several other supporting channels. These are to be used for purposes ranging from additional higher-quality audio (for, say, music classes) to disability mitigation uses, such as closed captioning.

There is a more important, qualitative difference, however. The Access Grid was designed for scientific collaboration, motivated by the concept of ideal virtual "cyber-meetings" among collaborating equals. The EWU-Whitworth team’s target is much more unilateral — to facilitate and extend the role of professor as "conductor of the orchestra" of the educational process. It is like the difference between a democratic backyard neighborhood barbecue and a chef-orchestrated wine-tasting dinner at a gourmet restaurant.

This will be the core innovation for the EWU-Whitworth team. If the envisioned Access Grid extensions are successfully achieved, the local project will be a success — and will then be positioned to join the many national and international projects seeking to develop the future of distance education.

Dr. Steve Simmons has been a professor of computer science at Eastern Washington University since 1990. He is the founder of the Terabyte Triangle economic project.

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