St. Joseph's University:
A Video Technology Showcase
"Syllabus" Magazine, January 2000
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St. Joseph's University: |
Despite its promise to bring life to campus instruction, the challenge of building and implementing video technology can be daunting. Here's how one university took on a leadership role in integrating video technologies into its business school curriculum.
To make strides in the use of high technology audio/video (A/V) equipment for instruction, colleges and universities are implementing fixed data and graphics projectors, using high-quality film screens, computer-video interfacing, shared media sources, centralized control systems, and dedicated A/V staffs to keep it all running. Among the leaders in these cutting-edge technologies is St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia. The school's new Mandeville Hall showcases the use of advanced A/V technology in higher education like few institutions ever have.
St. Joseph's president Nicholas Rashford explains the school's vision for the project, "Overall, what we wanted to do was to create a traditional classroom environment, but one that would cut a path for the next millenium, with the technology in the background, but enhancing the experience tremendously."
Home of the Haub School of Business, Mandeville Hall is a three-story, 88,000 square-foot structure with an atrium-style main lobby. Dominating the lobby is a Toshiba 100-inch video wall built into detailed millwork. The display comes alive with scenes from a virtual walkthrough of the campus to live events within the hall. Adjacent to the video wall are interactive touch-screen monitors that display campus information. In the classrooms, one might find an instructor delivering a multi-point distance learning (DL) course to students in the room and well as to others hundreds of thousands of miles away. In addition to DL classrooms, the hall houses two "Moot" Boardrooms with a Moot Observation Room and Moot Control Room between them, and a teleconferencing auditorium, or Teletorium.
To turn Rashford's vision into reality, the Glen Burnie, Md.-based consulting firm RJC Designs, Inc had a wide degree of latitude in how it fulfilled the goals, including the ability to make all the product and technology integration choices. As Rich Coluzzi, president of RJC explains, "Our goal was to take an innovative, system-wide design approach along with the visions of the University to the next level while not losing focus on the goals and needs of the facility."
To this end, nearly every room in the building is wired with multiple runs of base-band (A/V) and broadband (RF) cabling. A Master Control Center in an adjacent building controls all the external communication paths, including satellite link, radio frequency, and ISDN lines. Master Control's medial shared resources include laserdisc, DVD, tuners, video teleconferencing CODECs, and various video formats. Communications between buildings takes place over fiber, which is converted to analog at several points in Mandeville. This arrangement allows not only resource sharing in nearly every room, but also control of all systems locally and from Master Control using AMX Synergy and PC Touch control systems.
David Lees, Director of Instructional Media Services, worked with faculty members to form the ideas for the building. Faculty also participated in planning the kind of training necessary to use the new technology. "Within Mandeville Hall is the technology that by design will be used to enhance instructional opportunities and allow teachers and presenters to positively impact locally and on a global scale," he said. To ensure a high level of faculty literacy with the new equipment, RJC Designs, the A/V contractors, and accommodating equipment manufacturers trained Lees and his staff, who in turn host workshops to help faculty incorporate technology into lesson development and delivery. Rashford's edict that "There will be no lamp-style overheads in this building," underscores the University's expectation that faculty and staff will use the technology, converting material designed for overhead projectors or a dry erase board into Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint files.
Distance Learning Classroom from Student's Perspective
St. Joseph's distance learning courses will have the global reach that Lees envisions. The distance learning classroom (DLC) handles a variety of conferencing modes, including audio only, one-way video and two-way audio, standard point-to-point video teleconferencing, and multi-point video teleconferencing. The room can also incorporate computer-generated video within a conference.
To allow students simultaneous viewing of multiple remote sites and the local presentation, four Toshiba 50-inch monitor cubes are recessed into the room's front. A Hughes G1000 projector with a 120-inch Draper screen lowers from the ceiling, with the screen positioned between two of the monitors. For the instructor's use, a Panasonic projector with a 52-inch Draper screen is positioned at the rear of the room. A ParkerVision auto-tracking camera can follow the instructor's movements in the classroom automatically. The instructor's workstation consists of two side-by-side IBM color LCD monitors with associated CPUs that accommodate the AMX PCTouch system and the instructor's PC applications. Also at the station are Extron RGB 404 and 406 architectural computer-video interfaces, which allow a student's laptop to be integrated into the system.
The RGB 404 for guest presenters provides auxiliary composite and S-Video inputs to the system. The 406 is affixed to the instructor's PC. These interfaces do all signal conversion within the device and then route the signal through an Extron CrossPoint 84HVA matrix switcher. Computer and other RGB signals are then converted to NTSC via an Extron scan converter and sent to a matrix switcher strictly for NTSC sources. From here, computer signals may be used in video-conferencing or recording, or be displayed on the 50-inch NTSC monitor cubes.
Distance learning plays a large role in the activities and curriculum within Mandeville Hall. The business school assigns group work to students who may never actually see each other, except through a monitor. Following DL classes or Web-based instruction, students get together through Internet chat rooms to discuss projects. "We've been doing two-way conferences with Penn State's agricultural economics and agricultural science classrooms," says Lees. "The idea is to give students a broader scope of what is needed to develop a new product."
Finance Professor Chris Coyne has not only adapted existing lessons and materials to the technology, but has created a completely new way of presenting ideas. "I love how the technology brings such a dynamic element to the classroom," he says. "Internet access allows me to display the most current material, and not something from say ten years ago." Coyne accesses financial information during class, often through a Standard & Poor's Internet service. The information is immediately displayed for the entire audience on each class's data projector.
PowerPoint slides and Excel spreadsheets also figure into Coyne's lesson plans, whether generated on the class's computer or drawn from a laptop. Computer interfacing systems from Extron Electronics allow both to be displayed on each room's projector, which is also capable of displaying data from DVD and laserdisc players, VCR's and television signal feeds.
Similar technology is used in the Moot Boardrooms. Each Moot Boardroom features two tiers of elevated gallery seating in a U shape surrounding a boardroom-style table in the center. The University wanted a forum where students could stage debates and present evidence, while other students observed or commented from the gallery. Executive MBA students use the rooms to display and compare materials. "In free-form scenarios between participants, points and counter-points can be viewed without instructor interaction, giving a more one-on-one personal feel," says Lees.
Each of the 36 seats is equipped with a LAN connection for laptop computers, and every other seat has a Crown microphone. Again, the Extron interfaces play a key role. Every seat has an RGB 324 interface buffer, which connects a laptop's external video output to RGBHV and routes it to an RGB 320 interface switcher in the Moot Observation room.
By pressing the Show Me button on an RGB 324, each occupant may route video and audio from a laptop to the room's projection and audio systems. Coyne lauds the benefits of this classroom design. "I can get much closer to the students and their work by displaying it on the room's projector. I am able to see what they are doing as they are doing it and make corrections and suggestions as necessary."
Part of the design criteria of the Moot rooms was the ability to record video while the rooms were in use. ParkerVision auto-tracking cameras, when combined with the production equipment in the Moot Control Room, can be used for videoconferencing and video production, and to maintain a record for future classes and faculty. But this requirement posed a problem of lighting balance in the room: it had to be bright enough for video production while allowing visibility of the projected image. To overcome this problem, combinations of full, focused task, and key lighting to specific areas were programmed into the control system, all of which an instructor can direct at the touch of a button. Biamp DLA93tc Digital-Logic Automixers, in conjunction with the room's audio systems, allow customized audio configurations for video production in addition to the room's other uses.
While faculty at St. Joseph's had a fairly good idea about what they wanted in the Teletorium, the teleconferencing auditorium posed some unique challenges to the design team. The 280-seat venue had to be flexible enough to handle anything from videoconferencing to an electronic classroom-style presentation. Add to that video pre- and post-production facilities, dual screen videoconferencing, a configuration for town hall-style meetings, HDTV, and digital expandability.
View From Rear, Wolfington Teletorium
The size and configurations for this room required several unique elements. To generate in image large and bright enough be viewed by the entire room, the design team chose the nearly 300-pound Hughes D340SC projector. They installed two screens: a 128-inch wide screen for 3x4 (standard television) format and a 171-inch wide screen for future HDTV/16x9 formats. Two additional projectors and 100-inch screens are installed toward the rear of the material while facing the audience and cameras. To viewers on the remote end of the conference, the instructor appears to be looking in their direction during a presentation. The display technology within the Teletorium includes two projectors for two-way videoconferencing. These projectors flank the D340SC, allowing viewers to see either two remote sites or a single remote accomplished by material presented by the instructor. The instructor has complete control of which sources are to go to which destinations or projectors.
Support electronics and a technician's control system for the Teletorium are housed in a local control center at the rear of the room. The Teletorium control room allows the room to be used in other production and control modes. It also allows a technician to run a presentation from the control room, giving instructors the freedom to concentrate on instruction itself without having to run the hardware. The complexity of the room also requires a facility for local staff support and production capabilities.
The room is used as a traditional, large-venue classroom as well as a forum for special events. Just recently, the Eastern Association of College and University Business Officers held a videoconference between Mandeville and five other universities. The videoconference capabilities of the room allowed the speaker to alternate between different remote sites on the Teletorium's main display.
"The promise of what Mandeville Hall is bringing to St. Joseph's is what gets us the most attention," says Joseph Lunardi, Director of External Relations at St. Joseph's. "This is one of the few facilities of its kind anywhere in this part of the country." Mandeville Hall has attracted the attention of nonprofit groups, other universities, and government agencies that normally would not have had access to this kind of technology. Many of the companies that already have relationships with the campus through the Haub business school have also expressed interest. In a time of transition and new possibilities in education technology, the lack of a set formula for technology integration poses a hurdle. The existence and use of Mandeville Hall shows that clearing the hurdle can yield new and innovative methods of using technology in the educational environment.