Proposal

Narrative

The department of Geosciences wants to develop tools that encourage collaboration among our faculty and students utilizing current, relevant technologies. One such tool that we see a strong need for is a Collaboration Station similar to that found in the state-of-the-art FAU eLearning training room.

The Collaboration station we are proposing will combine several aspects from the FAU eLearning training room.  The heart of the station will be a 70” interactive touch panel display that students and faculty can work on directly.  The display will have a micro PC attached to it as well as a ClickShare presentation system.  This way users can choose to view and interact through the attached PC or wirelessly with up to four personal laptops displayed at once using the ClickShare system.

In addition to collaborating within the room, we will also have a software based video conferencing system from Lifesize.  The Lifesize Flex allows on demand video collaboration through applications like Skype for Business, Google Hangouts™, Cisco Jabber®, and Adobe Connect.   

The collaboration station we are proposing will be available to all undergraduate and graduate students in our department as well as all department faculty and teaching assistants.  The station will be located in and will be an enhancement to our existing eLearning room in Geosciences. This room already has four workstations with web cams, drawing tablets and software for multimedia course development such as Adobe’s eLearning suite.  The room also has an existing conference table.  We wish to expand the capabilities of this room to be available for students and faculty to collaborate on both curricular and extra-curricular studies.  This might include things like class group projects where students can go to collaborate on an assignment, discussion meetings where faculty and teaching assistants can help small groups of students, group training exercises for classes or directed independent studies or many other opportunities where small groups of students need to collaborate with each other or with their instructor.  The collaboration station will also not limit students and faculty to the on-campus room.  By having the Lifesize Flex video system, collaboration can extend to other campuses and even anywhere in the world so that students are not limited by campus access.

Facilities

NA

Hardware Requirements

Software Requirements

None, we will use existing department and university license software.

Personnel Costs

None, will be completed with existing personnel.  

Other Costs

None

Timeline

To be ordered and installed as soon as funds are avaialble

Sustainability

We expect the system hardware ot last at least five years.  Any maintenance will be performed using department funds for regular budget.

Resource Matching

Geosciences is matching this project with existing hardware and software.  In particular, we will be integrating the station within our existing eLearning room.

Implementing Organization

Geosciences