120 miles no longer deter an educational partnership
On Friday, Sept. 24, Virginia Tech and Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center will celebrate the establishment of the Virginia Tech-Wake Forest University School of Biomedical Engineering & Sciences (SBES) academic program and the completion of a new interactive video classroom that is helping to make the academic exchange possible.
These video classrooms, which are state-of-the-art facilities, connect the medical training provided by Wake Forest with the engineering education offered at Virginia Tech, some 120 miles away.
The SBES graduate programs allow the enrolled students to earn either master’s or Ph.D. degrees in biomedical engineering, or a joint M.D./Ph.D. program through the WFU School of Medicine, or a joint DVM/Ph.D. program through the Virginia Maryland Regional School of Veterinary Medicine. Students may take classes on either campus or via distance learning while residing on their home campus in either Blacksburg or Winston-Salem.
Both Virginia Tech and Wake Forest have installed high-tech interactive video classrooms as the primary learning spaces for the SBES program. A key feature of the new learning environment is the ability for the professor to easily interact with students using multiple types of technologies, including new, state-of-the-art interactive videoconferencing. Learning tools such as Centra One and Blackboard designed for the World Wide Web represent two of the key technologies. These tools are supported by the Virginia Tech Institute for Distance and Distributed Learning and Educational Technologies, as well as by Wake Forest’s Office of Academic Computing.
Virginia Tech is using the Tandberg Director Videoconferencing system, enabling high quality interactive video conferencing. The system is able to handle the latest internet protocols. Faculty are able to incorporate a variety of interactive learning activities and rich media into their learning environment. For example, virtual office hours and interactive research seminars are now available.
This classroom, located in 220 Hancock Hall, is the first at Virginia Tech designed to use the H.323 protocol, a multimedia conferencing protocol that includes voice, video, and data conferencing for use over the network. Additionally, this classroom will be included in future research on video conferencing.
A contingent of Wake Forest faculty will visit the Virginia Tech campus on Tuesday, Sept. 24, to participate in the ceremony and to learn more about the research facilities at Virginia Tech. Representatives of Wake Forest’s radiology, neurology, biomedical engineering, pharmacology, urology, orthopaedic surgery, internal medicine, biochemistry, microbiology and immunology, surgical sciences, plastic/reconstructive surgery, anesthesiology, and regenerative medicine departments will be participating.
They will visit a number of the biomedical engineering laboratories, as well as the Via College of Osteopathic Medicine, the Applied Biosciences Center, and the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute. Doug Eckel, director of research advancement, college of engineering, is coordinating the event.
A ribbon cutting ceremony to open the new classroom facility will occur at 4:30 p.m. in Room 220, Hancock Hall on the Virginia Tech campus. Simultaneously, the Teleconference Center on the Wake Forest campus will hold a ribbon cutting.
During the past year Glenda Scales, associate dean for distance learning and computing in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech, and John Boehme, associate dean for academic computing and information sciences, Wake Forest University School of Medicine Office of Academic Computing, were co-project leaders for launching the distance learning infrastructure project to support the SBES program. These academic and technical accomplishments were made possible by collaborative efforts among many university-level organizations on both campuses.
Founded in 1872 as a land-grant college, Virginia Tech has grown to become among the largest universities in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Today, Virginia Tech’s eight colleges are dedicated to putting knowledge to work through teaching, research, and outreach activities and to fulfilling its vision to be among the top research universities in the nation. At its 2,600-acre main campus located in Blacksburg and other campus centers in Northern Virginia, Southwest Virginia, Hampton Roads, Richmond, and Roanoke, Virginia Tech enrolls more than 28,000 full- and part-time undergraduate and graduate students from all 50 states and more than 100 countries in 180 academic degree programs.
