Faculty Directions, Fall 2003 - Need Drives the Use of Breeze and Flash: A Personal Account

John Leininger
Department of Graphic Communications

How are you supposed to teach your classes when part of your responsibilities within the department require you to travel? This is the situation in which I find myself in the Department of Graphic Communications. I am now making an increasing number of presentations at various conferences and trade shows the country. At last count that would be 30 industry events in the last 18 months. I cannot attend this many events and not conflict with the normal class schedule. Initially coordinating travel with exam days, guest speakers and student presentation days seemed to work. Separating the students into class sections based on whether their schedule was flexible enough to accommodate doubling up on the days I returned from traveling also alleviated some of the conflict.As far as labs were concerned,
coming in with me on weekends allowed students extra time to make up for travel days. It was important that the students understood my reason for traveling was to seek support for the department in the way of equipment donations, job placement for the graduates, and promoting the value and recognition of the program. I gave them my cell phone number and allowed any student to contact me every evening after 10:00 p.m. when I was away. They all were supportive, and I thought the extra effort was appreciated by the students. I thought they understood that a critical value of the program was created by past travel of other faculty, now retired. It all seemed to be working fine until I received my course evaluations. They were the lowest evaluations I had received in 16 years at Clemson with all of the comments focused on my time out of class and the inconvenience of switching their presentation days.

Even with all of the extra time on the weekends and the opportunity to contact me via cell, I was rated low on being accessible. This was unacceptable; the next semester I used substitute teachers for the days I was out of town. This made the students happy, but I was dissatisfied because the substitutes did not always cover what was on the lesson plan. There had to be an alternative. I began looking for some way to teach my own lectures even if off campus, and looked more closely at training software available for distance teaching. Most people want to use distance learning to teach students at various locations around the country; in my case the students would be together, but I would be at various locations. Planning to invest my own money into purchasing the software, I was disheartened to find the least expensive software available was a stand-alone option for approximately $1,200.00-a bit outside my budget. At the same time I was asking Jon Hoskin, CCIT college consultant, if there was a problem with any of the possible software options I was considering. Several weeks later he informed me about a new software program that CCIT was considering for distance learning. I offered to be a "test site." This was my introduction to Macromedia Breeze and Macromedia Flash Communications Server MX.

Breeze is a great solution. I can create a PowerPoint presentation with audio, video, and builds, and I can draw on the image area with the cursor. The presentation is then streamed on the Clemson server using Macromedia Flash Com, so when I am out of town the only elements that are flowing over the Internet from my location are my audio and video signal. Once a microphone (several around the class) and video camera are hooked up to the Classroom Technology classroom computer, I will be able to receive video and audio back from the classroom. In the meantime, the facilitator in the room can type messages to me. I have experimented with Breeze from a Classroom Technology classroom down the hall from my class and from my office with a conference call with several industry partners. Once you open the door to teaching/communicating from a distance, you can offer solutions to all sorts of problems. Over the next three years, I will be an international officer in a trade association. I see Breeze and Flash Com as the ideal solution for reducing travel costs to board meetings and for staying in touch with theother officers and committee chairs. This fall I will be traveling to offer hands-on training for variable data printing on laptop computers. During the first stage of this training, I will use Breeze and Flash Com to teach my lectures. During stage two, I will have a guest speaker create a PowerPoint presentation, travel to their location, and run a two-hour webinar. The costs compared to many other alternatives are actually quite practical.

There is still a learning curve, with a number of technical issues needing to be worked out. In June, I attempted to make a presentation from out west. I got up at 4:30 a.m. my time to be ready to teach my 8:00 a.m. class Clemson time, but technical difficulty made it impossible for me to present. In a different time zone at 4:30 a.m., it is difficult to replace a power adapter and because it was 7:30 a.m. at Clemson, there was not anyone to call when the student page did not come up. We took two steps back and improvised. This was simply another step in the process to successfully presenting anywhere in the country. In addition, I am changing my cell phone contract to facilitate being able to present from anywhere (short of while on a plane). I will be able to present in the airport, hotel room, an empty conference room or from a computer available at any company site I might be visiting. The video signal is of higher quality when you are on Ethernet, but it is certainly acceptable over a phone line hooked up to a local Internet service provider. A second limitation is that changes cannot be made in the presentation during the transmission. Creating your own Flash presentations and uploading them right before you need them is practical.

In summary, the important features available from Breeze and Flash Com include a low cost alternative to pricey commercial options, true real-time interactive distance teaching/learning (you can see each other and students can ask you questions-a true advantage from my past experience with distance teaching), and finally a flexibility that allows you to adjust the tool to your needs.