Lights, camera, action.
Video-conferencing technology enabled graduate students at UC Davis (above) to enroll this past fall in a course, Glycoconjugate Biochemistry, taught at San Francisco State University. "We didn't have enough students at UC Davis to offer such a specialized course," says Professor Jerry Hedrick of
the division's Section of Molecular and Cellular Biology (left foreground). "But between the two campuses we
had enough students to make it a go." Working closely with San Francisco State Professor Bruce Macher, Hedrick
was a producer, director, and actor during the transmission of the live lectures from San Francisco to Davis. The
two faculty members also established a site on the World Wide Web to provide students with lecture notes
and learning exercises, and to manage the course. Although they found that teaching by video-conferencing is
not frustration-free, both think the technology could become a very important tool for connecting people with
shared interests and for breaking down geographic and institutional barriers.
UC Davis Biological Sciences Newsletter - Winter 1998