Alumni Magazine - Fall 2008 - (Page 60) With a faculty of 24, Georgia Tech Savannah has about 10 students to every professor. One student likens the campus to “a little community.” wave-acquisition stereo system measures waves over an area rather than at one point. WASS has been installed near the Grand Canal in Venice to monitor the water motion caused by boats passing through the canal and determine its effects on the canal’s borders and on the historic buildings along them. WASS also is being used as part of Italy’s public works project MOSE to protect the ecosystems of Venice and its lagoon and also will be installed at an oceanographic tower off the coast of Venice to study the occurrence of extreme or rogue waves and wind-wave interactions. Fedele says that WASS could be installed off the Georgia coast to investigate ways to improve the design of coastal and off-shore structures. Georgia Tech Savannah has partnered with the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography to offer a new graduate-level program in coastal science and engineering in which students will have the opportunity to investigate such issues as water contamination, sediment transport and invasive species. Of the nine students now taking the first course, two are from the Georgia Tech campus in Atlanta. Connecting a Person to a Person EORGIA TECH SAVANNAH STUDENTS SAY NO ONE on the campus is a stranger, and there are plenty of opportunities for one-on-one time with faculty. “It’s like a little community,” says Ashley Randel, a fourth-year civil engineering major who transferred to Georgia Tech Savannah from Valdosta State University. “Everyone knows everybody. If you have any problems, you can talk to a professor. It’s not hard to get in to see somebody.” With a faculty of 24, Georgia Tech Savannah has about 10 students to every professor. Still, undergraduate students receive about 30 percent of their classroom instruction from professors at the Atlanta campus via distance learning. Graduate students may rely on distance learning even more to pick up specialized courses. Unlike distance-learning education at most universities in which a lecture is recorded and then posted online for students, all of Georgia Tech Savannah’s distance-learning courses are synchronous. Savannah students enrolled in Atlanta-based classes show up for class at the G same time as Atlanta students and may pose questions to the professor during the real-time lectures. And it works the same way for Atlanta students taking Savannah-based courses. Researchers at Georgia Tech Savannah are now working to further enhance the classroom experience for students taking courses through distance learning. When Georgia Tech Savannah was established, Frost says, most of the technology then available for distance-enabled classrooms was capable only of connecting a classroom to a classroom. But Georgia Tech Savannah is interested in connecting a person to a person. “Some of our research activities are focused on the next-generation technologies, introducing things like high-definition television into our classroom-technology solutions, introducing things like stereo audio,” Frost says. Whether you’re talking about iPods or distance-learning classrooms, Frost says, today’s student is not content with yesterday’s technology. “All of these systems have to come closer and closer to reality,” he says. “Reproducing reality is important.” Today, most distance-learning classroom lectures are being captured by a single camera that can zoom in and out and usually follows the instructor around the classroom. Students screening the lecture in a remote classroom or on a computer monitor see only the instructor. Working with Hewlett-Packard, several Georgia Tech Savannah faculty members, including electrical and computer engineering assistant professor Ghassan Alregib, now are looking into fan camera technology. In a classroom equipped with fan cameras, a lecture is shot by an array of cameras. Each captures a small part of the scene. The small images then are stitched together with software to recreate the bigger picture. Using joysticks or similar devices at their desks, students may zoom in to a particular piece of information on screen. “Teaching is about connecting a professor with a student,” Frost says. “And so that has been sort of the core of all of our developments as we have moved forward. And yes, it takes time. And yes, it takes money. And no, I don’t have everything I want in place, but we have remained very focused on the fact that teaching and learning is a person-to-person activity.” 60 Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine • Fall 2008
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