Enabling long distance education with realtime video

Education as we have known is changing. Thanks to information and communication technologies we have connected and brought teachers and students together in several ways. While the modern classroom is equipped with interactive whiteboards, teachers are using laptops and presentations, collaboration and team work of students is supported with Web 2.0 tools, still the high quality of the whole educations relies in the hand of excellent teachers. For some schools though, it might be challenging to get such teachers, especially in rural regions. In this paper we are presenting our experiences using real-time communication and collaboration tools to teach complex topics to people on another side of the World. The paper shows how modern Internet tools can provide a platform and place to study online, either using advanced videoconferencing - TelePresence, or using Cisco WebEx, or Google Hangouts. It is based on a case study of a longtime cooperation in this field between the Technical University of Kosice (TUKE), Slovakia, Europe and the Paradise Valley Unified School District (PVUSD), Phoenix, Arizona, USA. The key message of the paper is: The power of high quality real-time video is in live face-to-face communication, emotions, gestures, body language, etc. Using such a communication channel we can deliver high quality education to any place on the World with Internet connectivity.