Telepresence teaching visual equipment

摘要

Telepresence teaching is a very useful complementary means of allowing university teaching whenever there is a lack of local resources. To be effective it requires a user friendly environment for both teachers and learners. The experience of the Technical University of Milan in delivering telepresence courses for more than four years has promoted investigation and development of effective teleteaching equipment. The paper suggests a teleteaching standard and presents the equipment being developed at Politecnico di Milano. A layered equipment architecture has been introduced while users requirements and available technologies are intertwined to identify equipment functional specifications. Modular equipment as a Teacher Tracker, a Laser Beam Mouse, a Student Pointer and a Multiplexed Videocodec are among the designed and prototype equipment. The activity indicates the possibility of applying well established technologies in teleteaching systems by promoting University laboratories where user requirements and a large spectrum of technologies are investigated to anticipate useful products whenever market specifications are not yet established.