Uncompressed HD video for collaborative teaching — an experiment

This article describes a distributed classroom experiment carried out by five universities in the US and Europe at the beginning of 2007. This experiment was motivated by the emergence of new digital media technology supporting uncompressed high-definition video capture, transport and display as well as the networking services required for its deployment across wide distances. The participating institutes have designed a distributed collaborative environment centered around the new technology and applied it to join the five sites into a single virtual classroom where a real course has been offered to the registered students. Here we are presenting the technologies utilized in the experiment, the results of a technology evaluation done with the help of the participating students and we identify areas of future improvements of the system. While there are a few hurdles in the path of successfully deploying this technology on a large scale, our experiment shows that the new technology is sustainable and the significant quality improvements brought by it can help build an effective distributed and collaborative classroom environment.