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• UW Colleges and UW-Extension collaboration provides students statewide with access to credit courses
• Wisconsin Public Television's "Way of the Warrior" will be broadcast nationally in November
• Teacher helps class 1,000 miles away

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UW Colleges and UW-Extension collaboration provides students statewide with access to credit courses

The UW Colleges campuses and UW-Extension Instructional Communications Systems (ICS) have a long and very successful history of collaborative work.

Together they deliver UW courses and programs to students throughout the state. UW Colleges provides the course content, while ICS provides the technology expertise and systems. Over the past 25 years, the technologies supported by ICS and used by UW Colleges have changed greatly, from electrowriters and freeze-frame video to today's WisLine Web (webconferencing) and WisLine Video (videoconferencing) systems.

Partnership benefits UW Colleges engineering students

"We use ICS and its technologies to serve all engineering students in the UW Colleges," says Christa James-Byrnes, associate professor of engineering at UW-Barron County. "With only five professors of engineering, seven of our campuses do not have a resident engineer. The technologies at ICS allow UW Colleges to offer the complete array of freshman and sophomore engineering core courses to all of our students at all of our campuses."

"Through the Distance Education program at the UW Colleges, these students obtain the required courses they need to enter into their major after their second year at the Colleges," adds James-Byrnes.

Distance-education courses encompass varied disciplines

This fall semester more than 20 courses are being offered by UW Colleges to students across the state via ICS webconferencing and videoconferencing systems. Subjects range from Assembly Language Programming and Music Theory III to French, German and history courses.

Classes typically originate on the course instructor's "home" campus, and are distributed in real time via distance-education technology to multiple UW Colleges campuses. Videoconferencing and webconferencing allow students around the state to interact with the instructor and fellow students.

ICS distance-education specialists offer technology training and options to UW Colleges faculty each semester. Throughout each semester, technical staff at each of the UW Colleges and ICS work together to support the day-to-day technical needs of faculty and students.

Students contribute to collaborations too

Scott Bouffleur, UW Colleges non-online distance education coordinator, describes a recent UW Colleges and ICS collaboration: "ICS staff spent a lot of time with us during the installation, testing and optimization of our conversion to video codecs [the devices that convert pictures into digital signals] at all 13 UW Colleges campuses. Since ICS was a pioneer in IP video [video over the Internet], it was very helpful to us."

The two organizations also work together to continually test and evaluate new technology tools and distance-education services. For example, this past year engineering professor James-Byrnes and her students helped ICS test a new webconferencing product. "Working with the ICS staff and this technology was quite rewarding for me, as well as for my students," says James-Byrnes. "This was quite exciting because the students were actually participating in research and moving the boundaries of distance education."

Distance-education success stories

Many UW Colleges students who take their freshman and sophomore engineering courses via distance delivery continue their education and graduate with an engineering degree. Here are just a few of the many distance-education success stories from across the UW Colleges campuses.

• A UW-Marshfield/Wood County student who graduated from UW-Madison received a research assistant position and is currently working on his master's degree in mechanical engineering.
• A UW-Washington County student will soon graduate in civil engineering from UW-Milwaukee and hopes to work for the Wisconsin Department of Transportation.
• A UW-Baraboo/Sauk County student was accepted to study architecture at a university in London.

"All of these students obtained all of their engineering freshman/sophomore level courses via distance education, which would not have been possible without the expertise of the ICS staff," says James-Byrnes.

For more information:

www.uwc.edu

Barbara Stinson
Director of Distance Education
UW Colleges
(608) 265-0659
barbara.stinson@uwc.edu

www.uwex.edu/ics

Mike Jones
Educational Outreach Specialist
Instructional Communications Systems
UW-Extension
(608) 265-8911
mike.jones@ics.uwex.edu

By Mike Jones, educational outreach specialist, Instructional Communications Systems, UW-Extension