Office of University Communications 

Missouri State receives AT&T Excelerator grant

SPRINGFIELD — Missouri State University’s Center for Scientific Research and Education (CSRE) has received an AT&T Excelerator technology grant. The announcement was made recently by Kevin Vossen, southwest Missouri’s representative for the Missouri AT&T Excelerator Grant competition.

Dr. Larry Banks, CSRE director, will work with Jim Tice, superintendent emeritus of Strafford Schools, to apply new teleconferencing technology to distance education delivery through the Missouri Virtual School.  

“We believe this new technology can be another step in our quest to enhance distance education opportunities for students in Missouri’s small rural schools,” Banks said. “This new approach will be delivered over the Internet by one of our teachers at the Missouri Virtual School, one of the many public affairs initiatives at Missouri State.”

The course chosen for this pilot study will emphasize mathematics. AT&T representative Debra Hollingsworth, who also chairs Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt’s Mathematics, Engineering, Technology and Science (METS) Initiative Committee, says her committee endorses all efforts to improve students’ METS interest and abilities.  

 “Even though distance education courses are a necessity for some rural students today, we continue to believe that knowledgeable and well-trained teachers need to be in close contact with the students who take distance courses,” Tice said. “This technology represents yet another way that we can use the Internet to bring real-time teaching into distant classrooms.”