JISC

With education suffering increasing fiscal constraints there is growing pressure to make better use of resources through collaboration between departments, faculties and even institutions. Video conferencing is a form of communication with great potential.

To date however video conferencing has not been fully exploited by higher education institutes. Reluctance to embrace this technology has perhaps been a result of its unreliability and poor visual/audio resolution caused by a lack of network bandwidth. However, with the advent of improved communications protocol and broad bandwidth networks the major drawbacks previously experienced may now be overcome.

This report sets in context and summarises a set of experiments carried out to test and determine the suitability of the new video conferencing and broad bandwidth technology in relation to fundamental pedagogical activities.