Tele presence

[Scott Tiner]

Hi All

We are contemplating a collaboration with other schools, in which we use tele presence in order to have one instructor teach a course to multiple locations. 

My CIO has asked for an order if magnitude cost estimate. Having no experience with this, I am wondering if you could help me think about this estimate.  

What would it cost to set up a telepresence room that would hold 15-20 local students?

Thanks

ST

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Scott Tiner, CTS
Assistant Director for Digital Media, Classroom Technologies&  Event Support
Bates College
207.786.6396 (office)
207.240.1154 (cell)

[Wadlinger, Greg]

http://www.ivci.com/pdf/telepresence-polycom-rpx-hd-duke-university.pdf

 

Hi Scott,

 

I don’t think there are any figures described in the above PDF, but I wanted to send it along if only for the picture at the top. To me THIS is what telepresence is, going back to the old Telesuite company (Polycom bought them out.

 

I would estimate it’s at least a million dollars to build the room in the picture, and $10K/month in NOC charges for the pipe.

 

I’m eager to be corrected on this because I too am interested in knowing the true costs. Cisco may own the trademark to the word TelePresence, but to me Polycom captures the essence in their real presence experience rooms.

 

g

 

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[Todd Austin]

Hi Scott,

We teach a lot of classes like this. If you are connecting up to three locations (including your own), it works really well with a standard two-screen H.323 unit, like a Polycom Group 700 or equivalent (1 camera, two mics, two screens). We do it all as portable, so that we can set it up in whatever classroom we want. So, a couple of largish flat panels (55-70") on large roll-around AV carts, one of which carries the Polycom and camera. Let's say $15K for the Polycom, $4000 for a pair of nice LCD panels, and $800 for the two carts.

If you want to connect to a bunch of single students at multiple locations, then a cloud service is a nice addition to the above setup. We signed a contract with Blue Jeans, which allows us to connect with people anywhere with just about any tech and expand the use of our existing H.323 hardware. You can have 100 separate endpoints on a call with Blue Jeans.

The massive million-dollar telepresence suite is almost certainly not what you need. It's really only of any use if you have partners who have sunk the same money into analogous installations. Good luck having that happen! What you want to be is nimble and flexible, able to set this up where and when you need it and adapt it to the situations of a given course. If you dedicate a room to it, you'll find you can't schedule into when you need to, and you're stuck with classes that fit that space only where the students can reach that particular room. We find dedicated rooms to almost always not be worth the money.

Todd

Todd L. Austin

Videoconferencing Lead

LSA Instructional Support Services

University of Michigan

Todd L. Austin

Videoconferencing Lead

LSA Instructional Support Services

University of Michigan

Office:  2012 Modern Languages Building

Mail:  G353 Mason Hall

419 South State Street

Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1027

http://www.lsa.umich.edu/iss

lau...@umich.edu

cell:  734-274-7259

office:  734-647-1534

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[Thomas, Harry (CIV)]

Scott,

Like Todd, we do a lot of that, and he makes good points. But our requirements differ, and mobile systems don't work for us. Your mileage may vary WILDLY.

We use the term “video tele-education (VTE) classroom”. I suggest you define what you mean by “telepresence”. The term “Immersive Telepresence" used to imply the kind of high-end system Greg refers to and made a distinction from more typical VTC suites of old, but the marketing wonks have rendered the term meaningless by overuse. Regardless, Todd is right, the type of system shown in that brochure demands equivalent capabilities at the other remote sites in order to be effective. Otherwise it’s a bit like taking a motor-home on a backpacking trip.

We have 10 dedicated classrooms and instruction studios and they are busy. The classrooms seat from 12 – 24 students, the studios are for courses without resident students.  All of the classrooms have multiple cameras, document cameras, touch-screen control systems, video projectors & multiple flat-screens, chromakey systems, ceiling microphones & speakers, custom instruction console (larger than typical classroom lecterns), and are tied into our control center monitoring racks. I haven’t had to build one from scratch for quite a while, but I’d guess it would take between $50-75k for the classroom model. The smaller instruction studios would be more in line with what Todd describes.

Where are the remote students and how many locations? Will they meet in classrooms, or via their own laptops/mobile devices? Will you be setting the technical standards for those locations or just leveraging what’s already in place? Those are cost-driver questions. If you’re leveraging existing systems you need to know and understand what they are capable of to plan your own room effectively. The number of remote sites will determine whether you need a bridging service or just an embedded multi-site capability.

 

Regards,

Harry

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Harry Thomas

AV/VTC Engineer

Educational Technologies

Naval Postgraduate School

Monterey, California

831-656-7671

[Elaine M Mello]

Hi Scott,

 

I was going to echo what Harry just said, which was “it depends on what your definition of telepresence is.”   I’ve been working in synchronous distance education since 1999, so I’ve seen a lot of different types of collaboration over the years.   In our case it was usually one faculty member on our side presenting to a single or multiple locations.  If you’re building a room or two, I guess the question is whether this is a complete gut and build or tacking on technology into an existing space.  It can be as simple as a codec and camera rolled into the room and as complicated as a multiple camera, push to talk mics with technician run recorded course. 

 

My classrooms have local students as well as distance students for the courses, and can vary from a small group of 3 or 4 locally to a classroom with 70 (more if they cram in the aisles on the first day of class.)   Cost is dependent upon what you’re looking to do – interaction between the students as well as from the faculty to the distance sites, or just straight lecture without an active learning environment.   Whatever you do, it also should be coordinated with the partner universities to some extent.  Having a similar technology in terms of hardware (if that’s the route you go) will help with a lot of headaches in the future. 

 

We still do VTC courses, but in several cases where our distance students are distributed geographically, we’ve switched to Webex, as that has made sharing presentation materials to a wide variety of end users with different ways of connecting to the classroom.  The core technology for the classroom is the same (ie, cameras, automixers, etc) but the signal from the switcher goes to a computer set up for Webex rather than the codec.

 

Happy to chat more off line and can go into details regarding costs for what we’ve done here.  Our recent upgrade to HD in these rooms was considerably more than what Harry quoted, but we were also dealing with an existing infrastructure in the upgrade from SD, and the classrooms share a central router in that particular instance. 

 

 

 

Elaine Mello, CTS
Distance Education & Streaming Operations Manager
MIT Office of Digital Learning
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Avenue - Rm 10-337
Cambridge, MA 02139

    Tel:  617-452-2172
Mobile:  617-719-5279

Call me on Jabber Video: emell...@amps.ms.mit.edu

[Dechter, Christopher]

Hi Scott,

We're in the middle of a massive videoconference classroom upgrade project (14 rooms of varying sizes, multiple campuses, new construction and renovations), and I'd say for an HD-enabled classroom space, you'd be looking at $200,000.  Granted, I've done room designs with two PTZ cams and a codec for under $50k, but these spaces are closer to the old Cisco Telepresence systems in that each table of students has their own mics, PTZ cams, three LCDs, etc.  It's a big project and one that I'm involved in only peripherally, but I could put you in touch with the two guys who are living it on a daily basis.  Another thing to keep in mind is whether your room will be instructor-driven or operator-driven and plan the control spaces accordingly.

It's cool stuff, but the prices can go through the roof quite quickly.

If you want a true Cisco Telepresence-style suite, set aside seven figures.  Seriously.

Chris

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Christopher Dechter

Classroom Technology Services

University of Missouri - Kansas City

From: Scott Tiner <sti...@bates.edu>
Reply-To: "av...@googlegroups.com" <av...@googlegroups.com>

Date: Saturday, July 12, 2014 11:57 AM
To: "av...@googlegroups.com" <av...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [av-1] Tele presence

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