Video Conferencing - Environmental Law At A Distance
Benefits includes gaining knowledge on different legal system, being taught by well-known professor and international feedback

The Comparative Environment Law is presently being taught by professors at NUS and at Pace University School of Law in New York. In this semester, Assoc Prof Irene Lye had approached CIT to provide video conferencing support to conduct the classes between law students in New York and Singapore.

Despite having to juggle the difference between the time zones, Assoc Prof Lye pointed out several reasons as why distance learning with video conferencing was the chosen method to conduct the course.

"This is a course on Comparative Environmental Law. Thus, it is essential to understand the different legal system in the world, and how they operate in the context of environmental law. It is best to hear it from, firstly, an excellent professor, and secondly, from mature students who come from different countries.

Additionally, the students from Pace are very international, coming from as far away as Russia, Brazil and Trinidad. They are excellent graduate students with environmental law experience in their own countries. They contribute to and enhance the class discussions. In turn, our students (some of whom are foreign students) also share their perspectives. For largely the same reasons, Pace has found it beneficial to link up with NUS."

Reliable technical service and support are essential for video conferencing classes to operate with minimal technical glitches.

"In previous years, we had linked up with Pace using the CUSeeMe technology, from the Law Faculty's seminar rooms. This has not been satisfactory, as the quality of the transmission can vary widely. The transmission can be quite good when we do our test runs in the early hours of the morning. But as the Internet traffic picks up, the quality falls. The link-up through CIT is much better. The sound is very clear if the other side speaks directly into the mike. More importantly, Prof Robinson's views are always heard very clearly. However the picture on the large screen is not very clear and it can do with some improvement.*"

*The quality of the picture on the large screen was not clear as data is being transferred at 128Kbps presently. Pace University is currently installing its IP infrastructure. CIT will be able to transmit via IP upon that completion, which will vastly improve the picture quality.

Assoc Prof Lye has this to say for lecturers intending to explore the method of video conferencing for teaching.

"I think video conferencing is an excellent way of collaborative teaching with top professors in other law schools and it should be explored. We have been thinking of linking up with a third law school, particularly in Australia. The time difference makes it quite workable, but so far, none of the law schools we know have the technical facilities/capacity. In one of our earlier classes, a former student from Norway returned to her home country, and logged in from her home. She was able to get the software for the CUSeeMe technology with advice from our computer experts, and she logged on for every class (not for credit but out of sheer interest and enthusiasm) even though it was two am in Norway! We are open to linking with another law school abroad to make it a three-way class."