For Associate Professor of Business and Economics Henrique Cezar, room 211 in Bentley, the result of a $50,000 investment in new technology, is already paying dividends.

Dubbed the telepresence classroom, it allows him to teach a course at JSC that is simultaneously available to students in a similar room at Lyndon.

“I would definitely like to see this used for our distance learning program,” says Cezar. “This would be a very good tool to gather students from all over the place. Another step would be something where you don’t have to be in the classroom to be able to access the lecture. That, I think, would be ideal. Because right now they have to drive to a site that has something like this, something already set up.”

As with most electronics-based systems, there can be technical issues with the telepresence classroom, but Cezar says that they are relatively few. “A problem I have when I’m there at Lyndon, because I teach there every Wednesday, is I don’t see this portion of my classroom,” says Cezar. “I can’t see. So I don’t know what’s going on here. There’s room for improvement, maybe adding another camera here.” Gesturing to a place on the wall closer to the blind spot of the first camera, he added, “Sometimes we might have some glitch with the microphones. Every table has one, so sometimes you have all those microphones on at the same time and it can be very disruptive over there.” But Cezar says that this problem is fixed by simply turning most of the microphones off.

Logan Devaney, a Johnson State senior says that there are occasional issues with the video quality. “Those issues are rare and usually fixed within the class period,” he says.

Devaney seems to be fairly happy with the telepresence experience. “It has allowed me to take classes that were not being taught at Johnson but were required for my major,” he says. “It has also allowed students from both JSC and LSC to connect and work together on projects.”

Cezar says that he has seen a generally positive response as well. “It’s interesting that a lot of students get motivated to be in classrooms like this,” he says. “For some reason they feel more up to date, I would say. They feel they’re in a more technological environment. They feel it’s not just their regular classroom with an instructor giving some handouts and writing on the board, so the feeling is different. They can all use their laptops here. So they have their computer there, the lecture here. Again, it gives a feeling that this is like an updated style of teaching and they feel good about it.”

Cezar thinks that the telepresence classroom could help to create more unity between Lyndon and Johnson as they transition from being two institutions to one. “You say NVU and you don’t provide something — students would not like it,” says Cezar. “They want a change. They . . . want to see something different. It’s easy to kind of centralize those two campuses if you have some kind of device like this to communicate with.”

Devaney agrees. “I see this as one of the key elements of the unification of the two campuses,” he says. “This is how we all get to learn together and expand the opportunities to take different classes.”

Cezar says that while currently the room is used by the Business and Economics department, it can be reserved by professors from any department. On the off-chance that you attend a class in this room, Devaney has some advice: “Make sure you look presentable [if] you sit in front of a camera.”