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Case Study
VoIP for Synchronous Learning
3/1/2007
www.nrgservers.com). Switching to Vent solved the sound quality problem and allowed Mac-based students to interact verbally during in game interactions.Using the cost sample from nrgservers, one can expand these costs for a small school to see if externally hosted VoIP (to support synchronous distance learning) is really affordable. Consider a population of approximately 1,200 students and 70 faculty members with 300 course sections of 20 to 50 students running each semester. Further, consider only external server hosting to relieve the IT department of server maintenance and to relieve loading on the school’s Internet connection and bandwidth.
For 300 course sections of 30 students each, the cost breakdown looks like the following:
- 300 course sections x 1-50 slot server connection per section x $10 per month x 12 months = $36,000 per year.
This means that each course would have access to its own VoIP Ventrilo Server. Not the most elegant solution, nor the cheapest, but certainly viable.
Even more elegant and less redundant would be to give each faculty member access to their own 50 or 100 slot server to support their classes. Assuming again a faculty size of say 70 members including adjunct and full time, the numbers now look like the following:
- 70 faculty x 1-100 slot server connection per faculty member x $20 per month x 12 months = $16,800 per year.
This means that each faculty member could share their Vent Server information with their classes each semester and provide channels (rooms) to align with each course they are teaching that semester. Even classes as large as 99 students could be accommodated at any time. Since students and faculty can only be in one course at a time, redundancy by course section is not needed in this case. This solution would provide faculty an opportunity to schedule a time to talk with all their distance students and present materials, go over homework and tests, and otherwise interact online in a synchronous way. If your online coursework is only asynchronous, it would also provide the students and faculty a way to interact that would create synchronous online office hours, or tutoring hours, without the requirement of being on campus on the part of the faculty member or the student. Given this information, and the growing desire to preserve a campus’s on sight bandwidth, off site, inexpensive VoIP hosting services may be one more technology tool in the teaching arsenal of the future.
Rebecca R. Whitehead is dean of academic affairs at the University of Advancing Technology in Tempe, AZ.
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