VoIP and Video Conferencing Bring a World of Possibilities

October 5, 2006 by Doug Worsham

Bringing guest speakers from out of the area into the classroom was once a pricey endeavor involving airplanes, hotels, and dinner reservations. Recent developments in internet telephony, otherwise known as VoIP (Voice over IP), and video conferencing make it easier and cheaper than ever before to communicate with people around the world.

Rather than fly guests to their classes, instructors are using these convenient technologies to record conversations with prominent guests and conduct live communication sessions with students and colleagues worldwide. Patricia Rengel and Nancy Bird-Soto in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese are currently using Voice over IP technology to provide their students in Spanish 226 with greater access to the language and cultures of the Spanish speaking world.

Their podcast, Personalidades de la Cultura Hispanica, has featured a number of guests living outside of the Madison area, including notable authors Angeles Mastretta and Bárbara Mujica as well as Dr. Julio Bird, the LaCrosse based cardiologist who was the first Puerto Rican to climb Mt. Everest. Commenting on the role this technology has played in her class, Rengel notes that "borders can be perceived as barriers. However, Voice over IP technology has allowed us to dissolve borders and barriers by bringing over eight different Spanish language accents into our classrooms. We've gone "global" with live interviews of native-speakers from the Caribbean, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Costa Rica, Spain, and Nicaragua. Ten to twenty minute audio clips immerse the students in the authentic language of outstanding writers, activists, musicians throughout the Spanish-speaking world. It's been an incredible experience for both the instructors and students!"

Joe Salmons, Mark Louden and Rob Howell from the Department of German were also interested in bringing a variety of different voices into their German 804 seminar on Interdisciplinary Western European Studies. They used a classroom-based video conferencing system from Polycom to allow their students to communicate in real time with students taking similar courses at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and universities in Frankfurt and Berlin. The Polycom video conferencing equipment is well suited for such interaction as it allows for real time, simultaneous communication between multiple locations. Prof. Salmons was very pleased to find that video conferncing technology is quite straight-forward. He says, "I guess the thing that really sticks with me is how incredibly smooth everything was from our end -- even with four connections on two continents and with very good quality. The technology just didn't get in the way of normal class and it required no real technical knowledge or special effort from us. I suspect a lot of folks would be shocked at how simple it is."

L&S Learning Support Services (LSS) provided equipment, facilities, and support for these projects at no charge to the instructors or their departments. Podcasting, video conferencing and Voice over IP are just some of the many free services LSS offers to instructors in the College of Letters and Science. If you'd like to learn more or get started on a project for one of your classes, please contact Doug Worsham (doug@lss.wisc.edu / 608-262-4965).