Professor Bellamy began by stating that "We are confronted with a rapidly developing technology which has a lot to offer, but it is by no means perfect." He told us that the Technical Working Group has come to the conclusion that the technology will prove workable and effective as far as Berwick goes and teaching between campuses is concerned, but that to realise its value "teachers will have to adapt to different ways of doing things".
The approach being taken in relation to Berwick is simple in concept - install technology to allow teachers to teach in ways similar to that prevailing at present. This will keep the need for retraining and additional preparation to a minimum. Further, it is hoped an effort will be made to record material for re-use on videotape, (to support distance education in particular), in the expectation that a combination of video and PC based tools might well prove effective.
The Berwick venture is expected to use `interactive TV theatres' seating about 50 students at each end of an electronic link, (eg Caulfield - Berwick). This would allow whatever is going on at the `sending end' - Clayton, Caulfield or Gippsland - to be seen and heard at the `receiving end' (usually Berwick), and vice versa, in a reasonably symmetrical arrangement.
It is envisaged there will be similar but less expensive facilities installed to handle the need to communicate small-group situations between campuses. This will use technology similar to that currently in use for video conferencing. Further, there will be a need to provide `desktop video' facilities to allow one-to-one interactions, and perhaps to allow a tutor to communicate with a small group of students who may be geographically distributed. The equipment to satisfy this need is coming down in price, and in the future, one can expect students to access tutors through the ISDN Telecom network when prices have fallen some more.
There also will be some ancillary equipment used, such as G4 fax, to allow transmission at high resolution of master pages of material such as lecture notes, for photocopying at the remote end and subsequent distribution.
Prof Bellamy went on to explain that with all this equipment involved, there are several technical challenges and problems. These are...
Beginning with the TV image quality, he explained that standard PAL TV as received off air at home is of an acceptable quality for most teaching purposes, but to transmit this in a digital form requires about 100 million bits per second. Satellite transmission can achieve this, but this is too expensive, as is optical fibre to Gippsland. Analogue microwave links have too short a range, and the cost is probably too high.
The way around this problem is to use a coder/decoder, or `video codec', "so that affordable and available transmission channels in the range from 128 kbps to 2 Mbps can be used." (In the best case scenario, this represents a drop of 50:1, from 100 Mbps to 2 Mbps. This still yields acceptably good results for `talking heads', but it does lead to resolution constraints for diagrams and texts.)
Lighting in theatres is another problem, because of competing demands. The light should be low enough to allow 50 or so people to see the projected screen display easily, but strong enough to enable the presenter at the sending end to see people in the audience at the receiving end, especially those who wish to ask questions.
Picking up the right sound generates a third problem. There will probably be a need for a `press-to-talk' button at both ends, so that camera and microphone can be targeted correctly at both ends.
Last but not least, there is the problem of having good actors as teachers who also prepare their material to suit the media that will be used, especially with respect to the size and colour layout (in visual materials) that will be needed to conform with the technical constraints of the technology.
"What we are proposing is experimental", said Prof Bellamy. The proposed technology is `leading-edge', meeting `best-in-the-world' practice, and the judgement that must be made is whether it is workable. The Technical Working Group considers it is, and that the weakest link in the system, the video codecs, will get by at present and will be upgraded later whilst continuing to use the rest of the gear. In this respect, out of an initial investment of around $3million for gear with an expected life of 10 years, only about $0.7million worth will require upgrades.
As a safeguard, the Working Group will be requiring the chosen vendor to demonstrate their system to the key players at Monash (VC, deans etc) before proceeding with the purchase of equipment. "The risk of making one's academic colleagues irate about what they have to use to teach are too high for the likes of me, Neil Clarke, and others who are involved in this," said a cautious Professor Bellamy.
He concluded with a simple observation - "Monash is large - it's probably got more than one person teaching the content of any subject. If we are to capitalise on our size we have to find ways of using educational technology so that two or more minds can be brought to bear on a particular subject domain, and then utilise the technology so that the effort per student taught decreases. If we end up increasing the cost per student, without getting a dramatic increase in quality and effectiveness of our teaching, we will have failed. With the Berwick project we are likely to increase that cost unless the facilities can be used more widely to teach between other campuses, and to record material for re-use, be it for distance education, open learning or on-campus teaching."
At this stage, Prof Bellamy handed over to Mr Neil Clarke of the Computer Centre at Monash.
Neil began by explaining that, because standard video is not of sufficient quality to display text, graphics and other visual images satisfactorily, the Group is recommending that the preferred means for presenting this information to the students will be to use PC generated images which come out at considerably better resolution than PAL quality TV. One of the recommended PC products will be Microsoft's Powerpoint presentation graphics package, working at standard VGA resolution.
He then proceeded to give an overview of the scope of the project, as seen by the Working Group. At this stage, the main task is to get facilities in place at Berwick to enable a small group of staff from the faculties of Computing and Arts to teach there in 1996. In addition to all the normal IT infrastructure such as PABXs, ethernet networks, file servers and so on, there is the need to install the special tele-teaching facilities at Berwick as well as at the source campuses of Clayton, Gippsland and Caulfield. The Group's perspective is to install appropriate technology that will meet practical teaching needs. "We are not dumping technology on you that the group thinks is `gee whiz', and it's also not something being dumped on us by the Canberra or Monash bureaucrats without somebody giving thought to how it might work in practice." There won't be blackboards or OHPs - such things don't work over a 20km or 100km microwave radio link. Instead there will be document cameras and PCs as the image capture devices, and the output devices in the theatres will be dual video projectors.
Neil explained that a different style of preparation and presentation will be needed to make a distance lecture work well. Attention will need to be given to preparation of visuals so that they map into the video format, with respect to the aspect ratio of the screen, the choice of fonts and colours, the number of words per line, and so on. The idea is to prepare well so that there is not much technical detail to think about during the presentation itself. Neil made the point that under the pressure of giving this presentation, all he was having to do was press the space bar on the PC keyboard to advance his Powerpoint `slides'. The Group is aiming to install "easy to use facilities that actually work in practice", and which should produce superior output to that obtained via a blackboard or OHP.
Neil spoke briefly about the three levels of technology that would be used to handle large group, small group and individual video communication, before concentrating on the details of the large group situation, in which tele-teaching theatres (seating about 50) will be used. He noted the importance of the lecturer being able to take the lecture off in an impromptu direction if this is desirable, perhaps in response to a reaction from the audience. He summarised the range of functions that would be catered for, and the equipment to handle these. In particular, he spent some time talking about the video projectors to be used, and why there would be dual projectors. He explained that the left hand projector would carry the digitised video image (of the lecturer, or video from the document camera or VCR source), and he demonstrated the sort of quality to be expected from a 2Mbps data stream. The right hand projector will carry video at VGA standard that comes from the lecturer's PC or other PC based source, and in general, this is the preferred way to transmit still images at a high resolution.
(Details are provided in an edited audio tape of this presentation, available by contacting Bob Thompson in the PDC.)
The session concluded with Neil answering questions from the audience. (His answers are to be heard in the audio tape, but note that it is difficult to pick up the questions.)