Students in Biophysical Methods (A&EP 570) are taught by Manfred Lindau, professor of applied and engineering physics, and Fred Maxfield, professor and chair of the Department of Biochemistry at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City. Maxfield doesn't commute. He lectures from New York City, appearing larger than life on a screen in 162 Hollister Hall.

In this state-of-the-art classroom, anyone who wants to ask a question can push a small button to turn on a microphone embedded in the desk; a camera mounted on the front wall zooms in on the questioner, allowing Maxfield some visual feedback. The rest of the time he sees the whole classroom.

"The visual clue is important to the presenter," says Graham Kerslick, associate director of the Cornell Nanobiotechnology Center. "If people are looking slightly baffled, you know it's just a little over their heads."

The Nanobiotechnology Center holds weekly seminars that also include Weill-Cornell faculty as virtual visitors, and a growing number of other research groups and classes are exploiting the ability to meet Weill faculty and students face-to-face, so to speak. Videoconferencing has become easier since Cornell established a 10 gigabit per second fiber optic pipeline between Ithaca and New York City, and Cornell Information Technologies' (CIT) Project Ezra has strung new fiber connections to classrooms.

In turn, upgrades in technology have been spurred by the growth of intercampus collaborative research and teaching. Late last year the university approved a $1 million plan for new technology specifically to support Ithaca-Weill collaboration.

"This has been an interesting challenge," said Tom Every, assistant director of Academic Technology Services and User Support in CIT, who manages the initiative on the Ithaca campus. John Ruffing, assistant director of Weill Information Technologies and Services, is in charge at Weill. Every spent the summer coordinating the purchase of equipment, hiring two new technicians and training tech-support people from several colleges. Two technicians also were hired at Weill. Now the technicians are running video conference sessions, giving demonstrations of collaboration technologies to faculty and researchers, and Every is designing equipment installations.

A limited number of fully equipped distance learning classrooms exist on campus. They include two in Ives Hall, created several years ago as part of a distance-learning initiative; two in Martha Van Rensselaer Hall, one of them just added in January; and 162 Hollister. Over winter break Biotech G01, presently using portable equipment, will be upgraded with a permanent installation, and Stimson 206 will be built from scratch as a videoconferencing facility. In New York, the Biochemistry Conference Room at the York Avenue campus and a facility at 575 Lexington Avenue will receive similar upgrades. The College of Veterinary Medicine maintains its own videoconferencing room, giving priority to its own users and charging a user fee.

In addition to videoconferencing, researchers are also becoming interested in using desktop Web conferencing for day-to-day interactions on projects.

Upgrades to videoconference systems won't come too soon for Byron Roberts, a student in New York in the Tri-Institutional Ph.D. program who periodically attends research seminars with Ithaca students, using a system that displays slides on a screen with video images in a small corner. "It would be nice to see people when they ask questions," Roberts said. "Otherwise they have to yell and cut me off."