As technology has boomed, classroom boundaries have expanded dramatically at NIU.

During the past year, NIU has offered nearly 38 courses to more than 877 students with a system known as video conferencing & broadcasting courses like television. Students from several regional community colleges, such as Waubonsee and Rockford Community College, have participated.

Janet Lessner, chairwoman of the Division of Continuing Education, said video conferencing has brought, and continues to bring, advantages to students.

“Video conferencing delivers credit courses to a variety of sources across the region,” Lessner said. “Nine video-conferencing rooms are currently located on campus, and are used to link a variety of community colleges across the Illinois area.”

Video conferencing specifically impacts a couple of graduate programs, and is used for departmental meetings, she added.

“Several graduate programs in the School of Nursing and Education use video conferencing often,” Lessner said. “A number of departments use it to cut down on the financial burdens of travel. We also use video conferencing for interviews with students and faculty while allowing guest speakers to speak in front of a broad audience in many different locations.”

John Hartman, a professor of Thai in the Foreign Languages and Literatures Department, said his experience with the system has been beneficial.

“I helped the University of Massachusetts evaluate students face-to-face over video conferencing to test their Thai proficiency,” Hartman said. “I was able to send assignments over the television instead of sending e-mail or other paraphernalia. Another advantage was that I was able to remain at NIU while teaching these students at UMass.”

Hartman added that students in remote areas such as Alaska have been able to learn Tai without traveling to NIU or other universities far away from home.

Lessner agreed that video conferencing may most affect community colleges and remote schools that have difficulty maintaining a required enrollment numbers.

“Students can take classes close to home and places of low enrollment,” Lessner said. “If you aggregate a few community colleges with low enrollment into one through video conferencing, then together, it’s a healthy, productive class.”

Hartman, however, said video conferencing, while usually useful in remote areas, could have a few future disadvantages.

“The time lag between my recorded voice getting to the students across the region was very slow,” Hartman said of his Thai broadcasts. “Not being in the same room, never physically meeting the students and teaching a language like Tai while having a tutor I never met helping my students resulted in some skepticism from my part, questioning whether or not students were actually learning all the concepts.”

Hartman thinks video conferencing might not be far enough ahead of technology to succeed fully.

“At this stage, technology is not as developed as it should be to ensure errors not to occur with video conferencing,” he said. “The system could break down right in the middle of class, and it is quite frankly not the perfect substitute for the face-to-face, in-classroom atmosphere in most regular courses.”

Lessner, however, said NIU’s future in video conferencing looks very bright.

“Video conferencing will promote distant learning from students all around the nation,” she said. “Blended courses using video conferencing and online courses shows promise to grow together as partners. And from this, I see some classroom courses completely becoming online courses.”