The five Principal Investigators (PIs) of The Graphics and Visualization Center, a distributed NSF Science and Technology Center*, report on the lessons learned from reaching an interactive graduate-level seminar involving their Jive sites over a high-end communications infrastructure. The experiences related will be of value to institutions presently conducting orO-considering distance learning. Although the experiences reported here are based on a high-end scenario available to this research Center, the present trends in technology and distance education should make these observations applicable in the imminent future to a large number of educational institutions. The Graphics and Visualization Center is one of the only organizations outside of the military to have a 24-hour a day, full motion, interactive video communications infrastructure that supports multi-way interactive video conferencing and data sharing. This televideo system is used principally for research and Center communications and runs over a dedicated full time TI based network connecting the five Center universities, namely, Brown University, the California Institute of Technology, Cornell University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Utah. The Center Pls worked together to developed a graduate-level interactive computer graphics lecture seminar designed to leverage the unique capabilities of the televideo system. This seminar is unlike traditional courses not only because it is fully interactive and attended by students at all five sites, but because the teaching is evenly shared among all five sites as well. Each site presented lectures in areas of recognized research strength, taking into account topic requests from the sites. The Director structured and organized the lecture series. The seminar has been conducted during the entire academic although individual lectures substantially or entirely. In assessing its impact to our students, we deem it to be quite successful. Students are able to experience interactive seminar lectures on. a wide range of topics with an authority and depth inconceivable in a course staffed by faculty from any single university. The challenges we faced were often surprising, and many were unanticipated. We hope that a summary of them, presented in an excerpted video clip of live sessions, illustrate the dilemmas and give a feeling for the talks. It is intended to help others more quickly benefit from related endeavors. These challenges ranged from the administrative (for example, scheduling around five university calendars is often painfully difficult) to the aesthetic to the structure and pedagogy of the seminar talks. Participants' expectations for a talk viewed on a TV monitor were unavoidably influenced by constant exposure to the high production value of commercial television and film. One very positive result of this expectation has been the ongoing development of many new visually-based software demos to show concepts and outcomes. Another difficulty sensed by the lecturers, despite the interactive capabilities of the system, was the relative lack of visual and auditory feedback cues from the distributed audience compared to in person experiences. With widely varying areas of sophistication reflecting the respective research emphases of each site, the distributed student audience also made it much more difficult to arrive at an optimal level of instruction and scope of topics. In general, we found that lectures exploring a narrower area with substantial depth were better received than broader overview-type lectures, even when many students did not have all the background experience that would usually be prerequisite. Evaluation issues such as multi-school accreditation, and grade assignment have also been of concern. Mechanisms for class assignments and outside class assistance are considered. Queuing of questions, and polling for questions remains an occasionally awkward activity probably requiring a side channel protocol for better handling. In addition to increased time spent by Center staff in preparation far these talks, the Center Pls and other invited speakers find that the televideo lectures require at least twice as long to prepare as traditional talks, and often much longer. Although our consensus is that the benefits for the students outweigh the time lost to other endeavors, the amount of effort necessary to make such a course successful is an ongoing issue.
