CRESTVIEW — A first-year student responded to professor Jamal Brown’s questions during an Introduction to Principles of Drug Action class at Florida A&M University’s pharmacy school.
Wileta Luckett was sitting in a classroom in Crestview while Brown was in a lecture hall more than 150 miles away on FAMU’s main campus in Tallahassee.
Using cameras and microphones in both places, Crestview students watch faculty lectures in real-time on high-definition television. They ask questions and talk with professors and their peers in the classroom in Tallahassee.
A “smart board” adjacent to the monitor in Crestview projects the same materials that Tallahassee students see.
As Luckett and her classmates prepared to take a quiz last week, they sat quietly with their test papers facedown on their desks and waited as Brown got the Tallahassee students settled down.
Finally, he looked into the camera and said in mock frustration, “Crestview, why can’t they be like y’all?”
Such live interaction uses Cisco Systems’ TelePresence, an audio-video “bridge” between the two campuses. Eight classrooms on each campus have the technology.
“FAMU faced pressure from the college accreditation board to show that its Crestview students would not be at a disadvantage while learning off-site from the College of Pharmacy’s main campus in Tallahassee,” Cisco stated in a case study of the local system.
Before adopting the system in Crestview, FAMU’s technology staffers evaluated similar setups used by pharmacy schools at Auburn University, the University of Georgia and Wingate University in North Carolina.
When the college accreditation board evaluated Crestview’s campus, it found that students there performed better than those who attended classes in person.
“The university partially attributes this finding to the Crestview students’ quick adoption of the technology for the learning process, making the students more likely to go back online to consult past lectures and course materials to better obtain knowledge,” the case study stated.
In addition to beaming teachers and students to and from Crestview, lectures are recorded and archived. That allows students to review material or see a missed lecture.
Student and faculty surveys found overall acceptance of the system, said Jason Mobley, FAMU’s senior computer support spe-cialist in Crestview.
“The technology doesn’t get in the way of the professor,” Mobley said. “All he has to do is turn on his microphone and teach.”
Dr. Margareth Larose-Pierre, FAMU’s associate dean in Crestview, said the technology makes the pharmacy program possible because budget restrictions bar hiring additional faculty at the satellite campus.
“Without the technology, we wouldn’t be able to offer the program,” Larose-Pierre said.