right down to the professor’s one-on-one
student conferences, which can be conducted with ECSU students through the
cameras mounted on every faculty computer.
It is somewhat experimental. Classroom
interaction between faculty and students
many miles apart is sometimes awkward.
“As much as we try to make it equal, we’re
never gonna be able to make it 100 percent equal,” said Jennifer Kacmarcik,
immediate past president of the UNC
pharmacy student senate.
“It isn’t going to replace all the nuances
and data you get in
face-to-face contact,”
said Joe Schuch, a
UNC classroom
technology architect
who designed the
pharmacy school’s
system.
The early returns
show no apparent
performance gap
between Chapel Hill
and Elizabeth City
students. The ques-
tion remains whether the latter will suffer
from the absence of much of the socio-
academic interaction the Chapel Hill stu-
dents can have in a much larger pharmacy
class and in a fertile health-school atmos-
phere.
But the pharmacy partnership is cracking open a window on what can happen,
in economies of scale and in the quality of
educational offerings. “This is viewed as a
very viable option for new school creation,” said UNC pharmacy Dean Robert
Blouin.
Counterclockwise from the top of
opposite page: From the control
room in Beard Hall, Casey
Emerson and his staff can
monitor three classes, each being
transmitted to Elizabeth City, and
they can intervene instantly for an
equipment problem.
This is what Associate Professor
Dennis Williams sees in his
Chapel Hill classroom — on the
back wall, his presentation
materials on the right screen and
his ECSU students on the left.
ECSU’s temporary pharmacy
building, housing classrooms,
labs and offices, is next to the
school’s science complex. The
university has funding for a
permanent building, planned for
2010.
A videoconference classroom at
ECSU, though smaller, has all the
technical facilities found in the
Chapel Hill classrooms.
