Move over blackboard and chalk dust. Move over pad and pencil. Even move over that overcrowded city bus. A new way to go to class is transforming the old-fashioned exchange of information, giving a very 21st century meaning to the phrase “face to face.”

Distance Learning and Conferencing at UCSD, a program that initially began some 15 years ago, has enabled seminars, classes, interviews and conferences to take place between people miles or even oceans apart. The novelty of this particular kind of Distance Learning is difficult to overestimate; the classroom environment is recreated to be nearly identical to the traditional one so that students at UCSD can sit and listen to a guest lecturer from, say, Singapore, as if he were in the same room. Likewise, instructors still can see their students nodding off and can respond easily when they hear them ask questions.

How is this possible? Sherman George, director of UCSD’s Media Center, explained that the program involves the “simultaneous transmission of distance students and the instructor” using streaming audio and video in real time. Located in the Center for Library and Instructional Computing Services facility room just adjacent to Revelle College, George helped build the room from scratch with Facilities Manager Howard Laurence in the early 1990s. George explained that the reliability of the network and technology has made Distance Learning progressively easier and more accessible.

“It’s pretty much a stable technology,” George said. “It’s not anything exotic now.”

In the control booth of the program’s sole venue, Laurence described the features of their state-of-the-art room: a graphics camera, Elmo slide to Video Transfer, and 60” Smartboard Interactive Display System, to name a few.

Laurence explained in layman’s terms what exactly all this media can do. Set up like a TV production studio, Laurence and his staff can add graphics to PC presentations, utilize picture-to-picture, manipulate 3-D objects, even superimpose the instructor onto the material he is presenting (picture a weather man) using their “chroma key” feature. The Smartboard technology, basically a whiteboard with brains, allows professors to write directly onto it, save it as a file, then post it on the Internet for later viewing. What’s more, each student in the facility room has their own microphone, while the technician at hand — who decides how both the instructors and students see each other — can pan and zoom onto an inquiring student.

“We run all the equipment and do all the testing so it’s ‘hand-off’ for the instructor,” Laurence said.

So how much does all this equipment cost? According to Laurence and George, not as much as you would think.

“The basic system runs on a couple thousand dollars, but it operates on the same standard used all around the world, either IP or ISDN lines,” Laurence said. Set up on a recharge system, the program bills individual departments and clients for their use of the room, and since there’s no charge per minute, it can be very economical, Laurence explained.

“It’s a modest amount of money considering what kind of results it delivers,” George said.

So far, the program offers undergraduate and graduate classes from various fields of study, including physics, anthropology and sociology. Laurence even recounted a time when the theater department used the facility to work on a script with collaborators in New York. The program is both nationwide and international, enabling communication between UCSD and South America, Scandinavia, Japan — the list goes on and on.

“It lets the university have more breadth and instruction and it allows the students to take courses they would normally have to travel a great distance to take,” George said. Moreover, “it allows people who have very narrowed expertise to teach at multiple campuses.”

Perhaps Distance Learning’s most promising product is the newborn graduate studies program established last year between UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). The brainchild of UCSD structural engineering professor Michael Todd, the program offers 15 graduate classes in a new field of study that goes across the spectrum of engineering.

“The program we offer is one of a kind, combining research that cross disciplines in mechanical, electrical, and computer engineering,” Senior Advisor to the Dean of Engineering Lindy Nagata stated in an e-mail. “To my knowledge the degree is not offered at other academic institutions.”

Dr. Todd, who is now co-principle director of the Los Alamos program, explained that Los Alamos initially approached UCSD because it identified the need to hire potentially 1,000 new engineers in critical skill areas. From there, Todd and his associates “pushed the envelope hard” to set up a template for UCSD graduates to take these classes. The program also acknowledged the need and demand to educate existing Los Alamos employees in such areas.

“Los Alamos employees need to be educated in these departments too,” Todd said. “There’s many who want to advance their education but can’t be relieved of their job.”

The result was a new graduate program built from scratch that relied on Distance Learning as its main medium of communication.

Currently, the program offers graduate students a degree in the area of structural health monitoring, research on technologies that detect damage and predict the remaining useful life of engineered systems. This research, Nagata explained, will support critical infrastructure management in both the civil and defense sectors, including stewardship of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, and maintenance of bridges, roads and aircraft.

UCSD has since made Los Alamos senior scientists adjunct faculty, marrying the know-how of UCSD students and faculty with the expertise of Los Alamos scientists and employees.

“By offering this program at a distance, we are able to connect with students who have excellent technical backgrounds, are engaged in research at a world-class facility and have a strong need for technical background in this area, but are physically isolated,” Nagata said. “LANL staff also share their knowledge and experience by mentoring students and teaching courses from our distant site back to students here at UCSD.”

Todd also listed a variety of potential clients of the program, who were no doubt attracted by the convenience of gaining a master’s or Ph.D without having to leave work.

“There are some big ongoing discussions with the high-desert communities,” Todd said, listing the Navy and defense companies such as Boeing among the locations where thousands of employees are seeking higher education.

Distance Learning does alleviate the pains of distance and seems to bring education right into your own backyard. But its heavy reliance on technology raises a familiar question: Is this another form of pseudo-communication that threatens to undermine real human interaction under the guise of speed and convenience?

Psychology professor Stuart Anstis, who specializes in sensation and perception, said “it [Distance Learning] doesn’t seem to me to be all that different.” Instead, Anstis explained, a bigger problem with communication may be found in the instructor-student ratio. Nonetheless, he admitted that with each step of technological distance, “you lose something. I’m not quite sure why.”

Associate professor of psychology Vic Ferreira agreed. “The limited fidelity of any video or audio transmission system, relative to ‘real life,’ will always make it so that professors can experience less about their students, and students can experience less about their professors,” Ferreira said. “Just like it’s much more engaging to see a band live than it is to watch a concert on DVD, so too do I think a professor is more engaging to see live than over a remote link.”

“But if we can teach more people in California because we can bring the classroom to them … that’s a good thing,” Ferreira said. “Providing more options to potential students in our state can only benefit them.”

Supporters of the system are also careful to note that Distance Learning involves two-way, real-time communication.

“This is not distance learning in the nonpersonal context,” Todd said. “If the standard is relaxed, then it enters a whole new realm of distance education. What is required is face-to-face communication even if that’s through a video link.”

This face-to-face communication, Laurence explained, has not only built educational grounds but has also created long-lasting friendships between people who have never actually been in the same room.

“It’s almost like they’re right there,” Laurence said.

So, although Distance Learning may not give you the pleasure of reaching out and touching someone, it may just be, as Laurence says, “the next best thing.”