Direct contact with teachers is something that many students take for granted.

After all, since kindergarten, students have presented teachers with apples, heard chalk squeak on the board and poured liquids into beakers in chemistry class.

The highest technology many students encountered in high school may have been getting called to the principal’s office over the intercom. However, times are changing, and so are the technologies and learning techniques at Iowa State.

The Brenton Center for Agricultural Instruction and Technology Transfer in Curtiss Hall is one area on campus committed to developing new ways for effectively delivering curricula.

The College of Agriculture is teaching and receiving classes via the Iowa Communications Network (ICN). The ICN fiber-optic system connects more than 500 sites in the state, ranging from the three Regents universities to community colleges, high schools and libraries.

Harold Crawford, coordinator of the professional agriculture program, played a pivotal role in bringing the ICN technology to ISU. Crawford, who deals extensively with long-distance learning, said ISU is the origination point of most distance-learning agricultural classes.

The ICN has been a welcome addition to the college since its inception in the fall semester of 1995, he said.

“It’s a fun facility,” Crawford said. “I’m very proud that the College of Agriculture has facilities like this.”

The semi-retired professor said the new wave of technology is exciting.

“I love it. I think it’s stimulating and challenging. It doesn’t scare me the least bit,” he said.

Eric Hoiberg, associate dean of the College of Agriculture, said the advancement has made ISU more dominant in agricultural education within the state. Hoiberg said a major benefit is its accessibility to a wide range of people.

“The ICN is a marvelous kind of technology for educational purposes,” he said.

Crawford said the system is important for his department because it has increased ISU’s “visibility and opportunities” in the state and around the country at an important technological time. “Distance education is the fastest growing form of education,” he said.

Richard Carter, head of agricultural education and studies, said one of the missions of the program is to reach statewide, national and international audiences.

The courses are taught at the ISU site, located in the basement of Curtiss. The Clifford V. Gregory and John Deere classrooms are two of eight ICN-compatible classrooms on campus. Both rooms contain full-range audio and visual capabilities.

The two classrooms are monitored by a main control room where the head controller, Ann Mundt, works to deliver the course across the ICN lines. With the help of a few student assistants, the rooms host 11 classes and numerous other activities each week, including speeches, interviews and meetings.

Crawford said he thinks transmitting between four and six sites is optimum. He said most off-campus sites generally have up to 10 students.

Both rooms are capable of serving as distance-learning origination points and receiving sites. Four 27-inch monitors make it possible to view a speaker or a teacher’s overhead materials.

At the receiving sites, a student camera located at the front of the room allows the long-distance teacher to see the ISU students. A teacher camera in the back of the room transfers the professor’s image to students at other ICN sites.

Instructors have the ability to display themselves, overheads, students at the host site and students at the receiving site on the monitors.

Mundt said professors vary in their degrees of technological proficiency. She said she switches cameras for some teachers, while others are able to go from monitor to monitor by using the touch pad located on the desk.

One major advantage over videotape and satellite teaching is that each student has access to a microphone for easy communication with the lecturer during the instruction. The interaction allows the professor to be more than a “talking head,” Hoiberg said.

Hoiberg, who has given presentations over the ICN, said interviews and workshops have been as effective as the classes. Currently, three-fourths of the long-distance courses offered by the College of Agriculture are via the ICN — a direct reversal of the numbers from two years ago.

The Brenton facilities not only serve agricultural students, but courses such as calculus and economics are taught in this fashion, as well.

Elgin Johnston, ISU professor of mathematics, teaches first-semester calculus over the ICN to a group of high school students in Council Bluffs.

Johnston said he has been forced to adapt some of his teaching methods for the class, but with practice he learned how to teach effectively within the system.

Chris Schultz, Talented and Gifted adviser for Abraham Lincoln High School in Council Bluffs, said the course has been a positive experience for her students.

“It brought them to a much higher level than could be offered here,” she said. “They really appreciated the challenge.”

Rainbow Hultman, senior at Lincoln High School, said she like the ICN class taught by Johnston. “It gave us an opportunity to have a great professor,” she said.

Hultman said it took awhile to get accustomed to the pressure of talking on the microphone in front of college students, but it eventually became routine.

Johnston agreed that it is harder for him to get some students involved because they are afraid of being on camera and talking into a microphone.

Schultz said she took a class over the ICN four years ago and thinks interaction is not a big problem. “I can speak from experience; you can be as involved as you want to be,” she said.

Mundt said from her vantage point, where she can see various monitors showing the different aspects and locations, she, too, has noticed a difference in the types of students who will participate. She said some are hesitant to draw attention to themselves, while others seem to be “camera hogs.”

Tests at the receiving sites are proctored, while assignments are faxed to the professor.

Adam Lathrop, ISU freshman in liberal arts and sciences, enjoyed Johnston’s class well enough last semester to take another ICN offering this semester.

“I thought it was a pretty good way [to learn],” he said.

Crawford said he thinks the ICN class works well for professors because it allows faculty members to review their performances on videotape, enabling them to correct errors or improve presentation delivery.

“It’s idel. I think it’s working very well,” Crawford said. “It’s a wonderful thing for self-improvement.”

The potential of ICN is hard to dispute, but not everyone is sold on its current status.

One such professor, who Mundt described as on the “cutting edge” of the teaching technology, is agronomy professor Ricardo Salvador.

Salvador, who has taught long-distance classes via satellite and on videotape since 1989, also has taught two ICN classes and is teaching one this semester.

Right now the ICN is not flexible or accessible enough to fulfill the original goal of statewide coverage, Salvador said.

He said the availability is not as good as it needs to be, which “takes away any advantage of two-way communication,” leaving many students preferring videotaped classes.

Salvador said it is a premature assumption to think that the ICN is more effective than previous methods.

However, Salvador said positive comments from students at off-campus sites about his teaching style and the technology’s prospective future keep him going.

Mundt said when the system started, the crew had numerous technical difficulties, but everything has improved “quite a bit.”

The operating costs also are quite expensive. It costs $18.50 per hour to transmit and receive at every site. Therefore, offering a three-credit, 15-week course costs the site, and ultimately the students, a large amount of money. “It’s not cheap,” Crawford said.

Hoiberg said there are limitations to the system and problems that still need to be worked out. “We aren’t putting all of our eggs in the ICN basket,” he said.

But the leaders in the College of Agriculture are finding more than a dozen Grade A reasons to be excited about the program’s future.

“The potential for the ICN is very large,” Hoiberg said. “ICN will continue to be a player [in educational development].”

“We’re visioning for the future,” Carter said.