Development of An Extended-Classroom IT Infrastructure for Engineering Instruction

To provide the same classroom experiential learning for local and remote students, the BAE department at UGA has developed an "extended classroom" facility whereas all involved (teachers local or remote; students local or remote) can hear, see and otherwise interact with each other. Furthermore, in real time, all local and remote participants can annotate their personal versions of classroom activities being recorded into searchable multimedia files that they can take home to review and modify. This report documents engineering instructional needs from the departmental, faculty and student viewpoints and describes the integration of the software "NetSupport Manager" and "Silicon Chalk" in the delivery of a Machine Vision course and a Java Programming course. This report also describes the adaptation of our video-conferencing equipment into this system so that symmetry is achieved between local and remote sites allowing easy switching between originating teaching sites during any given class session.