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Oval classroom with whiteboards in the Lewis Building at Case Western The University of Arizona's distance learning suite in "discussion" mode puter monitors has been replaced by life-size projections of remote students onto screens at the host site, creating more realistic, real-time interactions between professor and students, no matter what their location. For instance, the University of Arizona's Eller College of Business and Public Administration in Tucson has retrofitted two small seminar rooms into one distance learning and com- munications room for the college. Eller worked with TeleSuite of Englewood, Ohio, a manufacturer of "virtual collaboration environments" for business and education, to design and implement the classroom, which incorporates floor-to-ceiling screens on the front and back walls of the room. The distance learning suite allows Eller to offer its dis- tance learning program to students in California's Silicon Valley. TeleSuite has created similar rooms for Duke University's Fuqua School of Business in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, as well as a number of corporate customers. In one mode, the classroom projects the Silicon Valley stu- cal of the room's capabilities at first. He believed face-to-face learning is so crucial to a business education that no distance learning facility could even come close to duplicating the real thing. His first encounter with this technology, however, was a "life-changing experience," as he describes it. "No matter how good the visuals are, it won't replace a sit- Mark Zupan, dean of Eller College, admits he was skepti- uation where all students are in the same room," says Zupan, "but this comes as close as anything I've ever seen." The school's Silicon Valley students are so involved with the cours- es, says Zupan, they've asked to be issued student IDs for the Arizona campus, so that they can travel to the school, shop in its bookstores, visit its library, and even march in its graduation. Zupan predicts that as such rooms become more prevalent dents onto a screen behind the onsite students, which gives the professor the impression that they are sitting behind the students in the room. At the touch of a button, the professor can switch the room to "discussion mode." Then, the remote students appear on the front screen, allowing face-to-face dis- cussions between remote and onsite students. Faculty and administrators at Eller also use the room to bring in remote speakers, hold geographically dispersed conferences, or even to "break bread" with donors. among corporations, more business schools will incorporate them in their own facilities. "If a corporation has this tech- nology, we can deliver MBA programs to Cigna or AOL," he says. "The break-even point is only six or seven students." As important as distance learning has become, many edu- cators agree with Zupan that it's simply not the same as face- to-face. As a result, distance learning is one technology that's not making it into classrooms across the board. Like Eller, Weatherhead has only one room equipped for distance learn- ing—for now. "There was a point when our faculty were saying that every room should be outfitted for distance learning support," says Collopy of Weatherhead. "For us, that was a point when the relative focus of pedagogy had to come into play. We had to ask, 'Is distance learning going to be our business?' We decid- ed to hedge our bets in that direction. That is, we weren't going to pour a lot of money into it, but we made sure that if we wanted to in the future, we could." NIU students looking up information at an electronic information kiosk 32 Breaking Old Habits Perhaps the most compelling characteristic of new business classrooms is their capacity to accommodate an array of teach- ing styles, all in one building. While all rooms have similar technology, individual rooms may have different arrange- ments, from an oval theater-in-the-round to arena-style to small groups of desks. In such a building, a teacher can expect to find a consistency in technology, as well as a room to suit his or her unique style of teaching. In the past, professors were forced to adapt their teaching BizEd JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2003