University of Wisconsin - Extension

ICS WisLine Video Coordinator

608-262-5249

David Pilsbury, CEO of the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN), spoke at Showcase 2007, an annual event at UW-Madison for sharing best practices. This year’s keynote speakers focused on building networks of higher education. David and WUN work on ways to globalize higher education, especially at public universities where funds and resources are spare for international collaboration. He emphasized the “bottom-up nature” of the consortium; 3000 successful, enthusiastic faculty drive agendas toward projects that bring in venture capital and long-term funding for recovering transaction costs of internationalization.

David expressed his gratitude for Instructional Communications Systems’ (ICS) contribution to sustained cross-national collaborations: “The Pyle Center has enabled us to routinely offer to the members 14-site videoconference seminars…one-hundred times a semester…Together we have created value: they (ICS) have the technology, we (WUN) have the purpose, and faculty have the benefits.”

ICS connects WUN partner universities from Scandinavia to Seattle using ICS’s multipoint connection unit. That gives academics the ability to collaborate from a distance. Arne Winguth from UW-Madison Atmospheric & Oceanic Sciences says by participating in the monthly Earth Systems Seminar, UW faculty and graduate students gain, “expertise and detailed information on global climate change that would otherwise never be available to them.” Arne’s research and collaboration with WUN partners resulted in an award-winning publication on the development of a web-based tool for modeling marine and bio-geo-chemical cycles.

Leila Harris’s students from the UW-Madison Geology Department learned about developments in Human Geography in a semester-long seminar. ICS Instructional design staff provided Leila with trainings and simulations before the semester so she could be more relaxed during seminars when presenting. Her students participated in live videoconferences or viewed streamed content captured and delivered by ICS and made available via its link to the WUN website. ICS Technical Operations Center staff provided extra support to these students by making a recording of the day’s seminar available immediately for those who missed it; students were able to stay in the same distance education room and catch up before going into the discussion session after. At $15/hour for site support, it was a small investment in the future. One of those students may partner some day with a student in Beijing. WUN consortium chancellors are meeting there right now to encourage innovative faculty from Asia to share across the miles.

ICS is a service unit of the University of Wisconsin-Extension and provides interactive technology services for the UW System and State of Wisconsin agencies. More information about Instructional Communications Systems is available on the web at http://www.uwex.edu/ics.