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TEACHING CLASS FROM ALASKA
 

Despite being more than 3,000 miles from the Iowa State campus, Dirk Reiners, human computer interaction (HCI) graduate faculty member and assistant professor of computer science, didn’t cancel class. Thanks to a partnership formed in the summer of 2004 between the College of Engineering, the Virtual Reality Applications Center (VRAC), and Information Technology Services, Reiners could teach CS657—Advanced Topics in Computer Graphics—from the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, where he was busy with a research project. The partnership utilizes technology that connects Iowa State to Access Grid®, an audio- and video-rich Internet community that links a global network of researchers and educators through a continuous online stream of audio, video, and graphics.

Iowa State is one of more than 1,500 locations around the world using Access Grid for meetings, seminars, lectures, tutorials, and even college-credit courses. The first application of this technology on the Iowa State campus was a Fall 2004 course about virtual reality environments taught in collaboration with Purdue University and overseen by Professor Carolina Cruz-Neira, who at the time was VRAC’s associate director and the HCI graduate program’s associate chair.

Reiners says that teaching from Alaska wasn’t much different than lecturing at home. Using Access Grid, he adds, was a lot better than the alternative—recording the class and having students watch the tape later. “I like to see the students’ facial expressions so I can see whether or not they’re getting the subject matter,” Reiners says. “If not, you might totally lose them, so being able to see how they’re reacting is very important to me.”

The class was held in Room 144 Howe Hall, which is specifically configured for this sort of endeavor. Cameras located around the room enable instructors like Reiners to judge how students are reacting to the information that’s being presented to them. Using Access Grid also means students can ask questions in real time—as if the instructor were in the room with them. “The interaction with students was better than I expected,” Reiners says.

Before leaving for Fairbanks, Reiners contacted Paul Jewell, program coordinator for Engineering Distance Education, to make sure he could book the room. Jewell then got in touch with the school in Fairbanks, and after a few tests to see if equipment would work properly at both locations, everything was ready.

For Jewell, the challenge of a project like this is providing the tools that enhance faculty innovation. “That’s the exciting aspect of the world we live in,” he observes. “It seems like everything is global now and learning can happen anywhere.”

Reiners, along with Cruz-Neira and two students, was in Fairbanks meeting with researchers and scientists from the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center, educating them about modern virtual reality software systems. The two groups were also trying to find common research projects focusing on efficient use of visualization techniques in environmental simulation.