|
TAFE SA has been using videoconferencing to provide class access for our students
The South Australian population is dispersed over an area roughly twice the size of France or 1/10 the size of the United States. TAFE's responsibility in South Australia is to provide high quality, low-cost education to this geographically dispersed community.
 We ran our first classes at the beginning of the 1990 academic year, and have used a wide variety of systems, from CLI (see archive photo at right), through PictureTel and now TANDBERG and Polycom systems.
We have a network of dedicated classrooms, smaller student facilities, and meeting rooms. Overall, we have about 80 dedicated facilities, as well as a number of PC-based systems that are integrated with the rest of the network.
Currently, our main infrastructure is TANDBERG based and almost all of our staff have direct access to the TMS booking system to be able to book calls that automatically connect on demand.
Our network is as important to the way TAFE SA runs, as it is to our students. Our staff are distributed right around the state, and regularly use videoconferencing to manage and keep in contact with each other. Last year, we kept statistics for a single week, and found that in that one week, our staff saved over 46,000 km driving in cars, which saved over 900 hours of travelling time, and obviously let many of them sleep in their own beds instead of yet another night on the road!
One of our staff tells her story here. Vicki lives at Wudinna, which is located at the top of Eyre Peninsula in South Australia. She is the only member of her faculty located at Wudinna, and relies heavily on videoconferencing to keep in contact with the rest of that team.
|
