---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2000 22:41:28 -0600 From: Robert Olson <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Subject: Fwd: Class via H.323

X-Sender: [email protected] X-Mailer: Windows Eudora Pro Version 2.2 (32) Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2000 22:33:17 -0600 To: [email protected], [email protected] From: Larry Amiot <[email protected]> Subject: Class via H.323 Cc: [email protected], [email protected]

A historic event occurred this evening. The first class was taught using H.323 technology on the CIC purchased Multipoint Control Units located at OSU. A graduate seminar -spearheaded by Nosh Contractor of the UIUC- on "Communication Technologies and New Forms of Organizing" (the class has a slightly different name at different universities) was co-taught by the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Southern California at Los Angeles. A class at Purdue University also participated.

The class lasted from 4:00pm to 7:00pm CST. Each of the four sites used Polycom H.323 stations. I set up the MCU's located at OSU remotely from my Argonne site, and I passively monitored the conference using both Zydacron (I used this station to record the class) and VCON H.323 stations. A seventh station was set up at UIUC where the class was broadcast using RealVideo technology. The communication was entirely over the Internet with conferences using 384Kbps encoding (768Kbps full duplex). That required the OSU site to support eight times 768Kbps of bandwidth).

From a technical viewpoint, the technology worked well with only a couple of minor problems. One site had poor quality audio (I think that was a local microphone pickup problem), and we had the MCU crash once which required me to restart it remotely. The other sites had good audio quality, and the quality of the video was very good at all sites. The voice switching capability of the MCU seemed to work well in the multiple classroom environment. All sites are now learning how to best control their cameras and microphones.

We plan to archive the RealVideo recorded at UIUC, and I recorded the entire class on VHS tape. I plan to have it encoded in MPEG1 and made available on the VideoCharger located at Argonne. The class will continue on Monday evenings in to the beginning of May. Since the UIUC classes have not actually started yet, only Nosh Contractor appeared at the UIUC site. Thus, the archived video will be important for his class to catch up with what happened in this first class.....Larry

***************************************** Larry Amiot * Visiting Senior Research Scientist * Committee on Institutional Cooperation * With an office at * Argonne National Laboratory * 9700 South Cass Avenue * Argonne, Illinois 60439 * [email protected] * 630 252 5432 * *****************************************