FAMU College of Pharmacy Delivers Real-Time Distance Learning with Videoconferencing Solutions

Remote classes get a live, interactive experience that mimics the traditional classroom.

August 20, 2014 Chrissy Winske Leave a Comment

Florida A&M University started a distance learning program for pharmacy students via a Cisco videoconferencing system and a satellite location in Crestview. Each classroom has a number of technologies that allow the two campuses to have an interactive classroom experience.

“For each room, we got a Cisco TelePresence C40 which acts as the brain and two cameras. There’s a 12X-zoom camera positioned at the back of the room pointing at the podium the professor teachers from, and at the front of each room, a 4X-zoom camera pointing at the students. The cameras connect to the Codec C40, and the Codec connects to the network,” says Mobley.

LCD displays in the back of each room allow the two classes to see one another.

An Epson 5750 HiDef projector mounted on the ceiling is used to display lecture content on a 119” Dalite screen.

Ceiling-mounted Polycom HDX Ceiling Microphone Arrays with three microphones provide quality audio pickup of the professor and students in the classroom.

“We like these a lot because each unit has three microphones, and a ‘gating’ feature, so if somebody in the back is creating an unwanted noise, like moving a chair, the unit turns that mike off while it’s happening,” says Mobley

FAMU also purchased Shure lapel microphones that professors are required to wear during class.

60” LG displays at the back of each room act as “confidence monitors,” allowing the speaker to see the remote classroom.

Located inside each classroom podium are Shure microphones, a Crestron DMPS-300 room control system, Polycom Sound Structure (mixer) and a UPS.

The wall-mounted Cisco 4X 1080p camera provides a view of the remote classroom so the professor can see the distance students as if they were sitting in the main classroom. Video of each lecture is also recorded and stored for students to review as needed.

“We try to allocate 2Mbps for each inter-site videoconferencing session, to provide enough bandwidth for video — which is the lion’s share of things — plus audio, a smart board, and anything else,” says Mobley. “We already had a huge circuit on the Tallahassee side, so all we had to do was add a 10 megabit-per-second Metro Ethernet circuit to Crestview. A class’s connection is a simple IP data call, across Ethernet, just like on our campus LAN.”

As Senior Computer Support Specialist for FAMU COPPS, Jason Mobley oversees and manages the videoconferencing gear for classes, meetings and other activities. He credits part of FAMU’s success to the distance learning site visits that staff conducted before jumping into the university’s own program.

“The questions our faculty asked about teaching, during our own on-site visits, helped me understand about the technology, and helped the faculty understand about using it,” says Mobley. “Going to a live site meant we learned from fellow users, not just from the vendors.”

Distance learning has enabled Florida A&M University (FAMU) to help the city of Crestview meet a growing demand for pharmacists.

Through videoconferencing, the university has expanded its pharmacy program beyond its Tallahassee campus to what is now known as FAMU’s Crestview Education Center satellite campus. The distance learning program allows the university to reach more students without the cost of hiring additional teachers. It’s been so popular, FAMU plans to implement the distance learning solution into existing College of Pharmacy instructional sites in Davie, Jacksonville and Tampa.

Making Pharmacy Education More Available

Over the past several years, Crestview has become one of the fastest-growing cities in the state, but not everything there has kept pace with this growth, including the number of pharmacists. One of the challenges was the 150 miles — a two and a half hour drive — between Crestview and FAMU’s College of Pharmacy campus in Tallahassee. That distance was too great for easy commuting, especially for students with other commitments.

In January 2011, the Florida legislature designated funds for FAMU’s College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences (COPPS) to expand and create a remote campus in Crestview to serve as a pharmacy school for the area. However, as the College began to plan faculty coverage for those courses, they realized that the distance was also a constraint for teachers. The college would have to hire additional faculty to support these new satellite classrooms.

Videoconferencing to the Rescue

To minimize cost and optimize convenience, FAMU COPPS decided to provide distance learning via videoconferencing instead. Faculty would deliver lectures from the main Tallahassee campus to smaller satellite campuses and vice versa. In January 2012, the College of Pharmacy hired Jason Mobley as senior computer support specialist, to support the FAMU College of Pharmacy’s distance learning program.The college then began exploring videoconferencing solutions.

“FAMU’s network is on a Cisco backbone infrastructure, both wired and Wi-Fi, so we of course were going to look closely at offerings from Cisco,” says Mobley. “But we’re looking for the best match of features for our requirements, so we also looked at products from Polycom.”

As part of the evaluation process, a team consisting of Mobley plus four or five College of Pharmacy professors whose classes would be delivered using the proposed technology, paid on-site visits to pharmacy schools already doing real-time distance education with teleconferencing products. “We visited the Florida State University College of Medicine, which, like the main FAMU campus, is in Tallahassee, and uses Cisco gear, and we went to Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama, which uses Polycom gear,” says Mobley.

At Auburn, says Mobley, “We got demos, talked with their Pharmacy department’s Dean and interviewed professors regarding how they liked the Cisco teleconferencing gear for distance learning. We also went to the satellite location in Mobile, Alabama to see what it looked like at that end.”

After investigating several different vendors, FAMU decided to go with Cisco. The initial deployment was for eight classrooms at the Crestview campus, which have about three dozen seats each. On the Tallahassee end it was eight classrooms with about 150 seats each.