The year of 2020 has been a transformative year to play the roles of teachers. Everything has changed, including the way kids and university students go to school. During the pandemic, most of the world instated social distancing rules, 20-second hand-washing practices, and preventive mask-wearing in public. To say this affected the way educators…

The Distance Learning Prototype Lab (DLPL) at Saint Francis University's Center of Excellence for Remote and Medically Under-Served Areas (CERMUSA) was established in 1999 to explore and demonstrate how the merger of a variety of telecommunications technologies (video production, computer graphics, the Internet and teleconferencing) can improve…

The Open University from its inception in 1969 has been a technologically based university. It uses technology to deliver high quality, specially designed teaching materials to large numbers of adult students throughout Britain, and increasingly abroad, who study at home. The Open University's teaching system has remained basically unchanged since…

Across the globe, progressive universities are embracing any number of MUVEs (multi-user virtual environments), 3D environments, and "immersive" virtual reality tools. And within the next few months, several universities are expected to test so-called "telepresence" videoconferencing systems from Cisco Systems and other leading…

Several of the problems typically associated with efforts to extend higher education opportunities to rural communities--including small class size, lack of qualified instructors, and maintenance of quality standards--are successfully addressed by an audio conference network. Students in remote locations can participate in classes offered through…