But if you thought the University of Missouri intended to let professors use the system for instruction, think again. "TelePresence cannot be scheduled to deliver courses," a university Web page. This seems baffling, as TelePresence could be a killer app for distance education, potentially bringing a level of immediacy and student-teacher interaction that has been difficult to realize with asynchronous Web-based courses as well as virtual classes in Second Life (). Indeed, the announcing the $1 million lead gift to establish the campus TelePresence system specifically mentioned "greater teaching and research collaboration" as a goal. When the Standard asked the University of Missouri system about the IT department's note forbidding courses, the response indicated that experimentation was possible -- just not regularly scheduled classes:

In addition, TelePresence doesn't scale from a cost perspective. One of Cisco's , not including the network setup or integration, making it far too expensive for home users or more than a handful of remote sites to install.

Columbia Missourian, Division of Information Technology Web site and TelePresence user guide, University of Missouri System press release and email, TheStandard.com.

E-mail Ian at . Follow Ian on Twitter at . Standard updates and asides are available at and in our , and you can join our .