Can you (see and) hear me now? In 10 years, videoconferencing for the masses will be a snap. Higher ed is already there. (Videoconferencing).

SAY THE WORD "VIDEOCONFERENCING," AND for many of us, you'll evoke thoughts of a herky-jerky picture with fuzzy and badly synchronized audio, continually interrupted by network congestion, temperamental equipment, and other inexplicable technical difficulties--in short, a pale and unsatisfactory substitute for a face-to-face meeting.

But within 10 years, say the pundits, videoconferencing for the masses will be as simple and seamless as using e-mail or talking on the phone, with better picture quality than your favorite TV show, and audio quality good enough for the enjoyment of a symphony concert. Participants at dozens, even hundreds, of sites will interact as easily as if they were in the same room.

Higher education won't have to wait that long, however. Even now, students, faculty, and staff at U.S. colleges and universities are experiencing:

* A master class given by a star cellist in New York to a group of students in Florida.

* A graduate plant pathology course team-taught by three instructors at universities in three different states.

* A one-day distance learning conference with no physical location--just 200 different sites across the globe, linked by piles of rooting equipment.

Here Comes Internet2

The agent is Internet2 (www.internet2.edu), bearing just about the same relationship to the commercial Internet that a water main does to the average kitchen faucet. Internet2 started out in 1996 as the exclusive province of research, funded by about 200 large universities which each kicked in $500,000 per year to fund a network backbone called Abilene. These universities have also spent hundreds of thousands--sometimes millions--to upgrade their internal networks in order to take advantage of the big pipeline coming in.

Internet2's purpose was to expand the frontiers of computer networking and provide a way for researchers to quickly and easily swap enormous databases and image files. In November 2002, an international team used Internet2 to set a new record for data transmission by sending 6.7 gigabytes of data--the equivalent of two feature-length movies on DVD--across almost 7,000 miles in less than a minute. That's about 3,500 times faster than a home broadband Internet connection.

Still, the more bandwidth, the more uses people find for it, and videoconferencing has become another focus. "It's not just the traditional talking heads anymore," says Internet2 spokesman Greg Wood. "Now we can serve artists and musicians who haven't been able to get the quality they needed." True to his words, the last Internet2 users' conference featured a dance performance by two troupes hundreds of miles apart, which interacted with one another's images on huge video monitors as they performed.

"It's hard to remember the quaint early days of e-mail, where you had to deal with multiple systems and getting through gateways, and it was just a pain," says Wood. "But the same thing is happening now with videoconferencing: It was a challenge a few years ago to get it to work at all, and now the greater bandwidth of the network gives you pretty good quality video. We're no longer trying to compensate for the shortcomings of the network. Instead, we're using videoconferencing to extend classrooms and bring lecturers in. It's getting to be as easy as e-mail."

"It's much more compelling for large group-to-group scaling," says Ted Hanss, director of Applications Development at Internet2. "The images are of very high quality. If you're talking on a complex topic, you can see a student's furrowed brow. If you're taking a violin lesson, the instructor can see that you're holding your bow too tightly."

Beyond the IHE Classroom

It soon became clear that with a capacity of 10 gigabits per second, Internet2 had plenty of bandwidth to spare. In 2001, the original, members started the K20 initiative, to extend the use of the network to K-12 schools, community colleges, libraries, and museums. Any of these institutions can piggyback on the connections of Internet2 members, as long as they're willing to make the necessary improvements in their infrastructure.

State educational data networks in 25 states are also participating, so a school in any of those states may be able to get connected to Internet2 that way. For example, Oklahoma's Onenet is providing Internet2 connectivity to virtually all of the state's IHEs. (Two state institutions, Oklahoma State and the University of Oklahoma, are full-fledged Internet2 members.)

Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, interest has grown in alternatives to attending meetings and conferences in person. "We've started to videoconference all our meetings," says Kurt Snodgrass, executive director of Onenet. "We used to have people driving county by county for the department of health. Now they broadcast their meetings [via Internet2] and store the broadcast on their Web page for playback."

"It's not a replacement for travel, but it's an intermediate step between the phone and the plane," says Wood. "If everyone can save one or two trips a year, it pays for itself."

A Serious--We Mean Serious-Commitment

Connecting to Internet2 isn't a cheap or casual decision. The networking fees alone can run between thousands and tens of thousands of dollars per month, says Wood, depending on the location of a campus and what kind of connectivity is already in place. A college also has to commit to overhauling its internal networks--a capital cost which can run into six or seven figures.

The good news is that once the network is in shape, installing videoconference equipment is a bargain compared to a few years ago. "Five years ago, the basic cost of equipping a classroom was $40,000 to $80,000," says Michael Baker, VP of vertical markets for Polycom, one of the largest vendors of videoconferencing equipment to higher education. "Today," he says, "you can do the same thing for $10,000." For $60,000, he adds, you can buy a top-of-the-line setup, including individual microphones for 30 students, monitors, a control board, and an electronic whiteboard.

Baker predicts a not-so-far-off future of full integration, where an indisposed student with a well-equipped laptop can attend any class via videoconference--all without leaving his sickbed (or the beach), If, against all odds, he misses the class anyway, he can always replay it at the course Web site.

Videoconferencing Resources

Caststream (www.21stcenturymedia.com
Centra (www.centra.com)
ClassLive Premium (www.ecollege.com)
HorizonLive (www.horizonlive.com)
MediaSite Live (www.sonicfoundry.com)
Media Vision USA (www.mediavision-usa.com)
Polycom (www.polycom.com)
Radvison (www.radvision.com)
Sony (www.sony.com)
Tandberg (www.tandberg.net)
Tegrity (www.tegrity.com)
VCON (www.vcon.com)
VBrick Systems (www.vbrick.com)
VTEL Products (www.vtel.com)
WebEx (www.webex.com)

Videoconferencing Projects (Higher Ed)

ViDeNet (www.vide.net)
Internet2 (http://commons.internet2.edu)
Megaconference
  (www.mega-net.net/megaconference)
Video Middleware Working Group
  (http://middleware.internet2.edu/video/)
Video Conference Cookbook
  (www.videnet.gatech.edu/cookbook/)

RELATED ARTICLE: Live! from the New World Symphony.

Nothing illustrates the transformation of videoconferencing better than a master class at the New World Symphony, the country's leading orchestral fellowship program for music school graduates.

In a traditional master class, the master musician arrives to spend one-on-one time with students, critiquing style, correcting position and fingering, offering tips on interpretation, and imparting the benefit of his rich experience--a commodity for which there's no substitute.

And so it is at the New World Symphony, except that the students are in Miami while the master could be just about anywhere--Cleveland, London, or Hawaii. And rather than an occasional treat, the master class is a routine part of the curriculum, with two to four videoconference sessions a day, seven days a week. "Students don't perceive a physical barrier," says Tom Snook, NWS director of Technology and Information Services. "They tell me it's like having the person in the next room."

"With Internet2, the network of mentors explodes," says Howard Herring, the symphony's CEO. "We can bring our students to music studios around the country. It's incredible to me that discussions of subtlety in musical training can go on over Internet2 as well as they can in person." The NWS orchestra has a special relationship with the Cleveland Orchestra, which sends 12 of its principal musicians to Miami for a week at the beginning of every season. After they return to Cleveland, they have regular video contact with NWS fellows. "Our players hook up with them as they need to," Herring says. "It makes the relationship very strong."

Part of the organization's mission is to help its fellows network with professionals, and that's where cutting-edge videoconferencing comes in. With older technology and the regular commercial Internet, the sound and video quality wasn't high enough to even consider using it for musical instruction. So, inspired by the music faculty and technical staff at the University of Oklahoma, who had been exploring Internet2 music education applications, the New World Symphony investigated what it would take to get connected.

Snook saw a demonstration of MPEG-2, a transmission standard that offers superior image quality over the network. He was sold, and shortly thereafter, the symphony applied for, and got, a $200,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to purchase the equipment needed to set up Internet2 videoconferencing.

The money went for a network upgrade, as well as for four cameras on rolling carts, so that network-based classes can be held anywhere on the campus. The orchestra pays roughly $110,000 per year for its Internet2 connection. It's now raising money for a new $60 million performance facility with videoconferencing technology built in.

"This is an ideal medium for music and collaboration, and it's totally underused," Snook says. "It's a tremendous opportunity for any school with a music program, and it shows what the Internet will be like in 15 years."

Plant Pathology Goes Prime Time

Carol Bender of Oklahoma State University has team-taught a graduate plant pathology course over Internet2 to students in three states simultaneously--an experience she describes as "intense."

It started with a friend at Kansas State who had already done a three-way class with colleagues in Oregon and Nebraska. Oregon had dropped out, and she suggested that Bender's class take its place in the fall semester of 2001.

The transmissions were going to use a video standard called MPEG-2--a cut above the more widely used H.323 as far as data capacity and picture quality, and essential for quickly sending the highly detailed images needed to show tiny structures in plants. Oklahoma State didn't have the proper transmitting equipment on hand, says Steve Duer, manager of Emerging Technology for the school's educational television services department, so he borrowed it from erstwhile participant Oregon State, "The faculty thought it was just wonderful," he says. "it looked like live TV."

And Bender got a taste of what it was like to produce live TV: while the two other schools had camera operators during the twice-a-week, two-hour class, her department opted not to pay the internal fee involved for her to have such help, so she operated her own camera. When any of her 17 students wanted to ask questions, it was up to her to make sure they got onscreen at the right time.

Kansas contributed 15 students to the group, Nebraska eight. Those numbers made discussion sessions a bit awkward, though Bender says lectures went very smoothly. "It was difficult for some students to master talking into the microphones, and maybe some were intimidated, but they might have been more reserved than the others even in a live class."

Bender thinks she and her fellow instructors might have been a bit intimidated, too--by one another. Each was in the audience whenever any of the others were teaching, and there were guest instructors as well.

"The advantage was that the material was extremely current," Bender says. "We had a lot of guest lecturers who had just written review papers. I don't see how you could have been more current. And the students got to know other instructors." In fact, when information is this cutting edge, it hasn't yet become accepted wisdom. "The instructors occasionally got into arguments," Bender reports. "And the students really enjoyed that!"

The Intimate Megaconference

Whether you love or dread traveling to conferences, Internet2 is starting to move some of those conferences out of the real world and right into cyberspace. Someday, you'll simply attend from your desk.

Ohio State University is a major hub for the "Internet2 Commons," which allows any group of Internet2 participating institutions to conduct a multipoint videoconference via equipment set up and operated by OSU. OSU now carries about seven hours of conferences a day, says Robert Dixon, chief research engineer (he also works with OAR-net, which runs Internet2 for the state). Many of them are collaborative classes, wherein no individual IHE has enough interested students to justify offering a course on its own.

Several years ago, Dixon dreamed up the "Megaconference"--the largest virtual videoconference on Internet2. It's held nowhere and everywhere; sessions and social hours are populated solely by faces on screens, and everyone has to provide his/her own refreshments (though for a fee, organizers of the most recent conference sent participants a souvenir can of popcorn imprinted with the conference logo, to be consumed at prearranged moments for a communal experience).

Appropriately, the Megaconference topic is distance learning based on H.323, the most commonly used standard for Internet2-based multicast videoconferencing. Megaconference IV, held in December 2002, drew participants from 200 locations around the globe, including Hong Kong, Cyprus, Slovenia, and a research station above the Arctic Circle.

Registration was free, but required each site to do a test run with OSU and other participating hubs, to make sure things would run smoothly on conference day.

Each site "called in" to a group of Internet addresses at prearranged times (spaced out so that the demand for connections wouldn't keep anyone from getting a "dial tone"). Once logged in and online, the sites stayed that way until the end of the conference, barring technical difficulties. Their cameras were trained on participants' seats, whether they were making a presentation, watching the proceedings, or stepping out for coffee. The "floor" (that is, the screens of the participants) was held by the individual speaking. Dixon and his staff launched a major etiquette campaign to remind people to mute their microphones when they weren't speaking, so that a sneeze or a ringing phone wouldn't accidentally give them the floor.

"Nothing is better than attending a workshop in person," says Jill Gemmill, assistant IT director at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, who participated in Megaconference IV. "But with the amount of new information exploding and the budget difficulties of state institutions, virtual conferences are great for getting information without the cost of traveling and taking whole days off from work."

Art Recesso, research scientist at the University of Georgia, who presented a session on improving university-school communication in rural areas, was bowled over by the technological smoothness of the proceedings, given the vast number of locations represented. "This was much more personable than the typical conference," he says. "I felt more a part of the presentation and discussion. I was more inclined to ask a question."

Dixon says the Megaconference is a perfect setting for testing the limits of software, hardware, and transmission standards. "We break things," he says. "We drive them to the edge."

Update: MPEG-4

Just when you think you're ready to go to press with a videoconferencing story built around MPEG-2, along comes MPEG-4 (the standard for multimedia for the fixed and mobile web), and VBXcast, a new network appliance from VBrick Systems (www.vbrick.com), based on it, that may lead the way in ultrasmooth videoconferencing and distance learning. (The University of California-Davis has already debuted the device for a worldwide seminar on smallpox vaccinations.) VBXcast--touted to "remove bandwidth constraints, extending the reach of video to anyone, anywhere, on any network"--will soon be released for two-way conferencing; stay tuned.--EG

Elizabeth Gardner is A Chicago-based freelance writer who specializes in technology.