PC-based video conferencing: guidelines for opening a remote section of a course

PC-based video conferencing allows graduate and undergraduate courses to be presented at multiple locations across campus, to be shared with distant colleges and universities, and to be piped to corporate sites. With inexpensive hardware and software, courses in jeopardy of insufficient enrolment can draw from a larger pool of students, and courses which would be geographically inaccessible can be made convenient. Unlike an asynchronous course (e.g. a course over the Internet) a conferenced course affords public, real-time discussions among the instructor and students. Conferenced courses do not require the creation of an elaborate self-study guide. We have twice presented a course on Windows programming in C++ to a class of 50 students, seven of whom attended in a classroom on another campus thirty miles from the instructor. Our equipment was modest and both iterations of the course were highly successful as judged from evaluations of student attainment, anonymous course evaluations by students, and the subjective impressions of the instructors. This paper adds our guidelines for conducting and managing such courses to those currently in the literature