THE GLOBAL university is now a reality, with video conferencing facilities up and running in most Irish universities. Tony Perrott, head of the audio visual unit at UCC, has just installed a video conferencing suite there, and is developing links with foreign universities. He sees numerous applications for this high tech facility.
"The Erasmus programme, which involves 22 universities in Europe in 11 countries, will benefit hugely from our video conferencing facility. The programme is typically a question of Irish students spending part of their time studying abroad and foreign students spending time studying here. Now, the whole administration of that involves both college administrators and academics meeting with their counterparts in other institutions. The way that has been done in the past is that they get together and travel to each other's places," says Perrott.
"The one thing you can't do very easily with academics is to take research time off them. They hate administration in the first place and they hate having their research time whittled down. So, video conferencing is an immediate solution. It is cost effective and economical as regards time. They have multi point meetings in four or five sites communicating with each other. They trouble shoot their curriculum problems via the video links. They discuss their student problems, such as the logistics of moving students around, and so on. And it's all over in an hour and everybody is back at their desks afterwards.
"At the moment there are feelers out to everybody on campus and to industry outside about this facility. In the case of the Erasmus students, we have this academic programme in place and the Erasmus people are saying that this is a means for them to have immediate contact with the administrators and academics. If you have a problem with the Erasmus scheme or a problem with a difficult student, the normal scheme of things is to travel to Spain, say. But now, that's no longer necessary. Right now people are establishing contacts with the universities identifying that the facilities are there. The Erasmus people are quite excited about it. The response from them is quite substantial."
Video conferencing has been around for a long time, with the Americans way ahead of us in using it. "With the American universities, you might have 400 miles between campuses and you can have lectures in one location and students in the other. What makes it more accessible to everybody in both industry and education in this country is the fact that you now have the ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) digital telephone network. That is a digital telephone system which is fast enough to carry pictures. It's a dial up facility which means you don't pay for it unless you're using it. Typically, a six channel call to the US at peak time for maximum quality would cost £6 per minute."
Final year medical students at UCC who are based at Cork University Hospital, a mile and a half away from the campus, currently miss out on specialist lectures from visiting academics. "We have a pilot project day in April when we're going to demonstrate all of the technology and get a couple of relevant sessions together in both medicine and dentistry. We'll let the students see what it's like to have information coming down the tube at them. It's inter- active in the sense that the picture goes both ways. Questions can be asked and answered. The real value here is where a guy sitting in Tralee can have the professor from Berkeley on screen to ask him a few questions.
You get real value from this kind of interaction and it's 99 per cent of being there."
The interviewing of students for jobs is just one of the many other applications of video conferencing. "It's interesting in that the pressure for that has come from outside. The larger companies like Irish Distillers are now asking us to bring our students to our facility so that they can carry out the interview via a link and keep, their personnel people at home.
As well as point to point person to person links using a telephone with a computer camera on top, you can also transfer the signals from the unit to a large lecture theatre.
"You have the professor from Harvard up on a screen interacting with 300 students. Documents and slides can also be shown on the screen. That third level large scale video conferencing is going to become more common.
