NW Campus video system stretches instructor’s reach
By Matt Skates, nw news editor

     NW Campus has found a way to make one teacher go a long way.
     This summer the humanities division installed a two-way communication system enabling a live transmission of a teacher’s lectures to other college and high school campuses over the same kind of lines used in phone and internet connections.
     The classes allow students to earn college and high school credits simultaneously.
     The system consists of a video camera and two TVs in the main classroom and one TV and video camera in each of the sister classrooms.
     When students in sister classrooms want to take part in class discussions and ask questions, they tap on the microphone, switching on the camera in their classroom.
     Classes available in the audio/video classroom include English, American Sign Language and American history. Paradise, Lingleville Huckabay and Venus high schools, as well as Keller ISD, all receive video classes from NW Campus, making for a populous classroom.
     “Such a large amount of students makes for a unique classroom dynamic,” Angela Chilton, assistant professor of English, said. “The students get to peer edit papers from students at other schools, eliminating some of the bias that would have been there otherwise.”
     Work began on the classroom early in the summer, but the classroom was not ready until the week before school started. Although the system is operational, much of the current equipment is temporary.
     Final completion of the project is scheduled for January.
Instructors went to the Region II Service Center, which offers professional development activities and teaching aids, to receive a week of training in operating and teaching with the equipment.
     For the most part, the reactions from students and teachers have been positive, but with new technology comes new problems.
     Mike Matthews, humanities division chair, said, “The problem is all the classrooms need equipment. This is still in the trial stages to see how effective it will be.”
     This type of technology is just now becoming cost effective with the development of new information compression technologies.
     Dr. John Martin, associate dean of learning resources, said, “In the past you had to set up dedicated circuits; we are now able to run everything through one pipe.”
     The new classrooms are geared toward giving students the chance to take certain courses that they might not be offered at their local schools. The classes are subcontracted through the students’ local school and a portion of the tuition and fees is given to NW Campus.
     Forty-eight students are enrolled in the audio/video English class, about double that of a normal classroom. Chilton said this sometimes makes grading more difficult, but also allows her to be more democratic in her classroom proceedings.
    I’m actually committing more one-on-one-time to the students than in a regular classroom to try to make up for any dryness in the program,” she said.
     All the teachers say they are exited to be on the forefront of teaching technology and look for more of this type of instruction in classrooms in the future.