Telepresence classroom provides more opportunities for Castleton and NVU students
While teaching a course called "Tracing the Human Past," Dr. Matthew Moriarty is pioneering a glimpse into the future of Vermont public higher education.
Moriarty, who serves as Archaeology, Geography, and Applied Anthropology (AGAA) program coordinator, is utilizing the new telepresence classroom in an academic collaboration between Castleton University and Northern Vermont University. With eight students from NVU and nine from Castleton, there is a healthy mix of students from both Vermont State Colleges System schools.
"The key benefit to this setup is that it works for students who prefer the in-person classroom experience and those who need or prefer to do distance learning," Moriarty said. "The difference between this setup and setups that simply project the front of the classroom to online students is that those taking the course online have a real presence in the telepresence room. They are projected up on one of the screens at the front of the room. When they speak, the whole class can see, hear, and respond to them."
Take a virtual tour of the telepresence classroom!
The course is an introduction to archaeology that provides a primer on how archaeology works, with a sampling of case studies on cultures worldwide. It is one of the three introductory courses for the new Archaeology, Geography, and Applied Anthropology major.
"The best part of this will be that students at each of the institutions can participate in courses that, previously, they would not have been able to access," Moriarty said. "I am, I believe, the only archaeologist at the residential VSCS colleges. For some NVU students, this might be their first opportunity to take an archaeology course."
Moriarty said there is a mutual benefit of the universities collaborating to provide the best academic experience for students. A group of Castleton students in the AGAA program and Sociology program is taking a medical anthropology course in a similar arrangement with Janet Bennion, an anthropologist at NVU.
Castleton student Philip Williams said the cooperative course and the telepresence classroom have been beneficial to his education.
"Having the students from NVU has been an interesting experience ... it allows a larger pool of thought to be created in discussions which overall will help any course, more thoughts and questions never hurt in my opinion," Williams said. "On the note of the telepresence room, ... It helped make it feel like a much larger class than, say, if we were all on Zoom. I believe that it might be the best way to take advantage of smaller rooms and turn them into a much larger class, and then you can look at the needs of a student because not everyone is able to take a class online. That was actually my biggest concern coming back this semester was online courses since I know I struggled with them so being able to be in person and still be a part of a class of about 20 people has absolutely wonderful."
The course helps to strengthen a growing arrangement between Anthropology at NVU and the AGAA program at Castleton. Moriarty said they are already working on offering more courses in this format and will be adding NVU courses to the AGAA major. Many of these will be completed using this classroom or a new telepresence classroom under development in Leavenworth Hall.
"I think a lot of faculty see this type of teaching as a big part of the future. I've already been contacted by a number of interested faculty trying to get a better understanding of how it works," Moriarty said. "I think you will probably see more courses done using this technology in the fall and a lot more after that."