Let the music flow

ODILE NELSON

It is two days before Ulluriaq School’s first-ever violin concert and Adèle Dufour’s immense face is looking down at her class from a computer screen projected on a bare, white wall.

“Were you playing at the same time as I was?” she asks, smiling and resting her violin near her side. Dufour’s image freezes from time to time, chopping her movements and interrupting the flow of her words.

There is a pause, then her nine students laugh. Some yell “yes” while others yell “no” into the microphone that rests on a stool at the front of the class.

When everyone is sure no one else is talking, Chris MacPherson, the class’s violin teacher in Kangiqsualujjuaq, steps in front of a video camera.

“I think we’ve always played the song a little bit slower than you Adèle,” he says. When he speaks, every word is deliberate. He wants the microphone to pick up every word.

The somewhat stilted and slow exchange is typical for this violin class. But, given the significance of what they are doing, and a little fidgeting aside, no one seems to mind.

The children here are participating in a novel project – the first of its kind in Nunavik. They are using a broadband satellite connection to take violin lessons with Dufour and her small group of students, who live thousands of kilometres to the south in Buckingham, Quebec.

The project is opening many eyes to what videoconferencing could mean for schooling in remote regions across Canada.

History of innovation

Ulluriaq School, under the guidance of Alain Rochefort who serves as both a pedagogical counselor and computer technician at the school, has developed a reputation for innovative projects.

In 1996, the school was the first in Nunavik to have a dial-up Internet connection. Two years later, it had the first Ethernet connection.

Today, with a helping financial hand from the Quebec government and Ottawa’s Communication Research Centre and the support of the Kativik School Board, it is the only school in Nunavik to have its own satellite dish with enough bandwidth to hold videoconferences.

Last fall the school joined a dozen or so other remote schools across Canada in a test project with Telesat – an Ottawa-based commercial satellite operator. The company gave Ulluriaq School free monthly bandwidth to start a variety of one-off projects. The continuous violin classes began in November.

Rochefort says the decision to use videoconferencing in the classroom is two-fold.

“In the North, you have difficulty keeping interest in school. This keeps students interested,” he says. “But on top of that, it can help them learn some things they otherwise would not have the opportunity to.”

The hows and whys of videoconferencing

How it works is fairly simple. The two schools use videocameras and microphones to capture images and sounds. They then use their broadband satellite connection to videoconference – in this case simultaneously see and hear each other with enough quality to allow for music teaching.

As Rochefort explains, it is the type of connection that is essential.

The satellite connection at Ulluriaq School uses protected bandwidth and, because this connection is separate from the Internet, it allows for high-quality videoconferencing.

Videoconferencing can work with other kinds of connections but they won’t work as well, Rochefort says.

Dial-up connections with modems can’t carry information fast enough. Direct satellite connections that rely on the Internet are also not ideal because too many users fight for the same connection, causing delays.

Every week, Rochefort and a southern counterpart begin the violin class by linking the two schools’ computers using their broadband satellite connections.

Sometimes they would connect directly with each other. At other times, when a researcher wanted to sit in on the class for example, they would connect through Telesat’s videoconference bridge in Ottawa. This bridge allows up to four sites to videoconference at the same time.

Learning is bottom line

Of course, for the students, who graduated last week, all the technological details of why and how were peripheral to having a chance to learn the violin.

When asked, the students shyly answer that learning violin from Dufour was “fun” and “neat” but sometimes hard.

MacPherson, who had never picked up a violin before the project, says pretty much the same thing – albeit with a little more detail.

“I’d learn one or two weeks before, what the students would need to know… It’s been one of the most difficult things to teach. If you think , let’s say it’s a lecture course, reading or science, there’s nobody moving. There’s no expert telling you to move your fingers two inches but it came with trial and error,” he says. “On all aspects, it seems to be a success.”

The classes did not go off without the occasional glitch. Sometimes connections were painfully slow. Other times, there would be no connection at all.

But Rochefort is convinced that the technology could be a valuable tool in bridging the gap that exists between education in the North and South.

For example, upper grades classes like biology or calculus need teachers with specialized training – something most remote schools don’t have, Rochefort says.

But videoconferencing could allow an isolated school to hold weekly, interactive classes with a biology or calculus teacher in the South.

More importantly, Rochefort says, Nunavik schools could use the technology to strengthen Inuit culture.

“We’d like to see it not so much North to South but North to North,” he says. “Students could learn throat singing, drum dancing or even how to carve from artists in other communities.”

This goal remains a way off. Similar equipment must be built in Nunavik’s other communities, and schools will need to find long-term funding to maintain the expensive broadband connection.

But as Rochefort says, this technology was meant for a region like Nunavik and, last week, Kangisualujjuaq graduated nine young violin players to prove it.