Universidad Nacional de Colombia-Bogota

Considered Colombia's top University, the Universidad Nacional de Colombia' (UNAL) in Bogota (there are seven satellite campuses, including the one I visited in Medellin) is a massive mix of positives and negatives.

Being so large, and the focus of many of Colombia's, especially ColSciencias (the Colombian NSF) research initiatives, there is a lot going on here. I focused most of my attention on interactive learning initiatives going on in math and the sciences, but also was introduced to the diverse range of scientific research, social programs and cultural activities in the works at UNAL.

There are over 50,000 students, and the physics department alone has over 70 professors, to give an idea of the scale. There are well-established masters programs in all the sciences, and PhD programs exist, albeit with some inevitable issues. Post-docs, again, are not much of a presence here, due to lack of funding, but a push is happening for this to change.

I was introduced to Professor Rafael Hurtado by Professor Carlos Quimbay, who had subsequently been introduced to me by Professor Yeinzen Rodriguez at UIS in Bucaramanga. All are top Colombian particle physicists, but it's Professor Hurtado's new participation in virtual post-graduate teaching, along with his branching out into various social and development programs at the national level that grabbed my interest (I learned a great deal about a lot of things through our extensive talks).

Professor Hurtado teaches a graduate-level course entitled "SocioPhysics." It utilizes "TIC's," or "Tecnologias de Informacion y Communcacion," to create a mixed local/virtual semi-interactive learning environment.  Students in disciplines ranging from physics to biology to electrical engineering take the course in Bogota, Medellin and Manizales, all campus's of UNAL.

Professor Hurtado normally gives the course from Bogota, but I was able to sit in on two lectures, one "virtually," where he was in Medellin, and the second lecture while we were both in Bogota.

The course is structured as a combination of video-conference, with a camera, screen, and single microphone in each respective classroom,  along with a tablet that translates from the tablet screen to a virtual blackboard and computer screen, which immediately appears on the screen and virtual tablet in the distance classroom. There are also options of doing prepared power-point presentations, live document exchange, and more.

While there are some issues, not least of all the quality of the sound, which limits interactivity, the course does work, and this is the first time this course has been given, and the first time I've encountered an attempt at upper-level e-learning. Very interesting and very encouraging.

Professor Hurtado's colleague, and Italian physicist named Rafaelli Fazio, also incorporates some technological components to his Quantum Field Theory graduate course. He won a grant from the International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy, to use their OpenEya software and technology (a couple of cameras). One camera films Professor Fazio live at the blackboard, the other is a zoom that can be scaled over sections of the blackboard to better see the details of what he's writing. There is a 15-20 second delay between the two images, limiting the practicality of a live virtual instruction, but it is a useful tool for his students in Bogota for after the lecture. There seems to be good potential for this technology if an improvement can be made in the delay.

I had talks with many other individuals and groups interested in my project, and wanting to offer their perspectives and aspirations.

I spoke to Raul Ramos, a Spanish post-doc working on a "telemedecina" initiative that would connect doctors in Bogota and other urban center,s with rural parts of Colombia.

I met with a representative from the Colombian Ministry of Education, Ingrid Lugo, who explained to me the intention of basic mathematics classes being taught virtually from UNAL to entering engineering and science students at universities around Colombia to ensure their math-levels are sufficient to process the oncoming technical courses (this important initiative is intended to counteract the greatly varying, but often deficient level of high-school math education). They are searching for the best platform to implement this initiative.

I spoke with the director of the physics department, Dr. Anderson Dussan, who spoke of well entrenched pre-grad e-learning courses offered through PEAMA (Programa Especial de Admision y Movilidad Academica), which are transmitted live to UNAL's satellite campus's.

PEAMA classrooms and their technological functionality were shown to me by one of its developers, the physicist Professor Plinio Teheran, along with two of his graduate students, one of whom, Rogelio Alvarado, is a student in Professor Hurtados SocioPhysics class.

Professor Teheran has not stopped with the development of PEAMA, however, which itself uses advanced technologies and well-structured virtual classrooms to successfully teach a wide-range of subject matters (one particularly cool tool was a whiteboard that had a camera placed at the upper-left corner; the professor puts a normal marker inside a virtual marker, writes normally on the board, and the camera picks up the movements of the virtual marker and translates the content onto a computer screen, which is then transmitted to the students...again, it doesn't work perfectly, but the technology exists and can be improved upon). He and his student administer a course entitled "taller tic y educacion matematica," given on weekends to high school teachers looking to better learn how to use information technologies to improve mathematical instruction.

In addition to it's important outward purpose, the course is also a research tool for Professor Teheran. He and his students toy with implementing various interactive learning tools, such as Google Docs and Google Excel, for inventive forms of instruction and evaluation. The parallels to their ambition with this course, whose platform they hope to improve upon and extend to PEAMA and beyond, with my ambitions for this project and the platform I hope to help create, were striking. They have a basic but working model and a lot of interesting ideas.