Copyright 1997 CAUSE. From CAUSE/EFFECT Volume 20, Number 2, Summer 1997, pp. 48-52. Permission to copy or disseminate all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for commercial advantage, the CAUSE copyright and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of CAUSE, the association for managing and using information resources in higher education. To disseminate otherwise, or to republish, requires written permission. For further information, contact Julia Rudy at CAUSE, 4840 Pearl East Circle, Suite 302E, Boulder, CO 80301 USA; 303-939-0308; e-mail: [email protected]
by William H. Graves
Colleges and universities appear to be converging on the holy grail of universal intranet access with the escalation of investments in campus networks and in connecting personal computers to those networks. But universal access is a complex goal that requires forethought if it is to be managed and sustained. This viewpoint offers an institutional framework for justifying and ensuring (1) convenient and affordable access to a network-connected personal computer by all students, all faculty members, and most non-faculty employees, and (2) an institutionally affordable approach to supporting such universal access. It is arguable that these ends can most readily be achieved by synchronizing the goal of access with a plan to standardize on a few hardware/software configurations. These two goals (stated in the sidebar at right) are justified and discussed in a holistic context in the first three sections of this article. A final section offers suggestions for implementing these goals.
Colleges and universities vary widely in their priorities, philosophies, practices, patterns of funding, and students' financial and resident status. There accordingly cannot be one universal access plan to fit all institutions. This viewpoint, then, is meant to provide food for thought to those willing to entertain an aggressive position on universal access designed to contain future support costs at the institutional level. Hundreds of variations and details have been omitted with full knowledge that, in this case, the devil is surely in the details. The advice of this author and his institution -- which plans to achieve universal access but has not yet done so -- is to commit to getting it right by wrestling with the detail and accounting for all support costs and political traps before proceeding.
The rationale for universal access is tightly linked to the role of information technology in an institution's programs, which includes a transformational role in support of the academic mission and the administrative processes serving that mission.
Students, their parents, and other stakeholders -- for example, the legislature in the case of public universities -- expect the undergraduate experience to help students learn to use the generic computer and network tools and acquire the associated basic information literacy skills that are so necessary in today's knowledge-age businesses and professions. Students must have access to and learn to utilize the same digital learning infrastructure that shapes the work environment in today's profit and nonprofit "learning organizations" that will hire them when they graduate. Specifically, graduates must:
To communicate and work with their students and with their colleagues around the globe, instructors, researchers, and graduate students need these same information-age literacy skills, tools, and Internet access opportunities.
These same skills, tools, and underlying global infrastructure elements enable the institution to extend its learning resources and services beyond the time-and-place boundaries of traditional classrooms, libraries, and laboratories. For example, the institution can use the emerging anytime-anyplace-anypace model of instruction to reach those seeking lifelong educational advantages in the form of continuing professional development or personal growth opportunities. Many alumni, for example, may embrace the possibility of maintaining a lifelong socio-educational link to the institution. These new possibilities contribute to the local, regional, or national economy, meet the needs of non-traditional students, and allow the institution to serve more students with minimal additional investments in bricks and mortar.
In addition, many professors, researchers, and graduate and undergraduate students need network access to specialized technologies and digital resources that support research and professional practice in particular disciplines and professions. These include, for example, specialized databases and specialized software for statistical analysis, textual analysis, computation, and visualization.
In many profit and nonprofit sectors of the broader external environment in which the institution operates, information technology has enabled the redesign of communication processes, workflow, and many other business processes and practices to the mutual benefit of organizations and their clients or customers. For the institution and its constituencies to reap the same benefits, members of the faculty, staff, student body, and other authorized constituencies must have easy access, as appropriate to their roles and needs, to institutional information and a common set of communication and administrative tools. The institution must streamline or redesign its administrative and information services to the mutual benefit of all of its constituencies and employees by taking advantage of online systems, especially in the areas of student services, financial services, and human resources administration. These might include the student information system, the human resources information system, a common departmental accounting system, and many other planned or extant systems.
Most institutions have been investing in network infrastructure for the past several years. As this infrastructure achieves critical mass and becomes pervasive, it must be conveniently and affordably accessible to all members of the institution's community if it is to play a role in improving communication (internal and external), redesigning and streamlining institutional and instructional management processes, and strengthening and extending the reach of instruction, research, and public service.
If one student in a class does not have access to the institution's network, then the instructor cannot take full advantage of e-mail, a class listserv, a class Web home page, or a Web-based discussion group for the class. Conversely, the instructor must have access to the network if any student in the class is to take advantage of available network services. Similarly, every employee with responsibilities for using an online system, such as a human resources information system, must have online access to the system if the institution is to avoid the duplication costs and confusion of operating both an online system and a paper-based system. These examples illustrate the need for almost every member of the faculty, staff, and student body to have easy access to the institution's network and its resources. For most students and faculty and many staff members, this access must be available on campus and beyond the campus -- any time, any place. The key ingredients of universal access therefore are:
However organized and financed, universal access should be based on support for a limited number of configurations of personal computer hardware and software, for these reasons:
Most members of the faculty and student body and many members of the staff will want to connect to the network from a variety of different locations, both on and off campus. This argues for a focus on supporting laptop computers, but not to the exclusion of a few desktop configurations. It also argues for focusing on systems and applications that rely only on the network protocols of the Internet, since other network standards, such as those proprietary to a particular vendor, are seldom supported by remote-access services.
Computer labs cannot provide the convenient access required for students to take full advantage of the network at any time and from any place. For reasons of convenience and safety on most campuses, many students who live off campus prefer not to return to campus in the evening to access the network and its resources. Other students who live in residence halls prefer to work in the privacy of their rooms, and this is possible only if residence halls are wired or make provision for dial-in access. These factors and the unavailability of space on most campuses to accommodate additional labs argue for finding ways to place a laptop computer in the hands of every student. Any such program has to proceed in parallel with related efforts to provide (1) convenient network access points, including computer labs, throughout the contiguous campus for transient use by students, and (2) affordable remote access to the institution's network.
Student seats in most of today's classrooms lack power and a network connection, a shortcoming that can be addressed only by massive renovations or improved laptop batteries and wireless network connections. This means that, unlike members of the faculty and staff who may have an office with a network connection, students will have to continue to go to a computer lab to connect to the network during the course of their on-campus, class-filled day. This can be inconvenient when time is pressing, as it is, for example, for students checking e-mail or printing their work between class periods. Labs will therefore continue to constitute a critical safety net for providing on-campus network access and other services to students during the class day, even as more and more students own their own computers. Similarly, employees who do not spend their work day in an office will need transient access to the network during their work periods. Institutions accordingly should:
An institutionally provided dial-in network service typically has two limitations. It is toll free only in the institution's local dialing area, and it often cannot scale to provide the quality-of-service guarantee desired by those willing to pay for the near certainty of not getting a busy signal. Institutions therefore should consider working with commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) to ensure that students, along with members of the faculty and staff, can afford to purchase remote access services allowing them to connect to the network at a reasonable cost -- a fixed, flat-rate cost to the extent possible -- from almost any off-campus location in the world. This is especially important for students who do not live in residence halls and for non-traditional students who do not attend classes on campus. However provided, remote access is certainly a key component of any "virtual university."
There are a few ISPs with a national or even a global reach and many more with only a local or regional reach. Very few of these, however, currently offer the advantage of providing a connection directly to a campus network, with the consequence that "silly routing" frequently results in slow service. Internet2's GigaPoPs (gigabit capacity points of presence) may remedy this situation for participating institutions over the next few years. ISPs connecting directly to a GigaPoP will be able to offer the advantage of direct connections to that GigaPoP's participating institutions' networks. Even this advantage still leaves the off-campus connection at a disadvantage that goes beyond sheer bandwidth and speed. Many databases, such as MedLine, are licensed on the basis of honoring only those requests for service originating from the licensing institution's Internet domain. Only advances in authentication technologies and standards and new licensing terms from information vendors will address this deficiency in off-campus access.
Many institutions today own as many personal computers as they have faculty, staff, and students. These institutionally owned PCs often account for only a fraction of the PCs supported by institutions as more and more freshmen arrive on campus with a personal computer. These trends suggest that the universal access goal might be met without institutional intervention in many cases. But this is a deceptive reading. Many institutionally owned computers are antiquated and capable neither of connecting to a TCP/IP-based network nor of running today's productivity software. Many student-owned computers do not integrate well into their institutions' networks, and some students cannot afford to buy a computer.
The latter observation deserves special mention as a guiding principle in considering universal access:
All full-time students should have equal access to a baseline of information technology resources, including convenient and affordable access to a personal computer connected to the campus network at any time and from any place they are studying. In any plan that would have students directly bear some or all of the costs of these baseline services, the institution must be prepared to ensure equality of opportunity for students on financial aid or in tight financial circumstances and must adhere to the principle that access to the institution's baseline educational resources must be available throughout their studies to all potential students who qualify for admission.
Any universal access plan, whether at a public or private institution, is likely to ask students to bear their fair share of associated costs through tuition or fees. Any plan, therefore, should focus first on utilizing network resources in the instructional program and in mission-critical administrative processes to ensure that the institution's core instructional mission is served and that students receive a fair return on their investment.
Three suggestions deserve consideration by any institution considering a universal access plan:
Purchasing personal computers according to individual preferences and ability to pay, and operating these computers beyond their technological life expectancy may work well for many individuals, but cannot be justified in the presence of the equity issues and attendant escalating institutional support costs cited earlier. At the institutional level, these laissez-faire support costs and opportunity costs would be much higher than the costs of supporting a fleet of hardware and software selected from a limited range of options and retired at the end of its technological life cycle. This is the premise for the suggestions that follow.
All students, all faculty members, and most non-faculty employees will have convenient and affordable access to a personal computer connected to the institution's network at any time and from almost any place they are working or studying-a library, a home, a field location, or another off-campus location.
The institution will contain overall information technology support costs by supporting only a few specific configurations of personal computer hardware and software to be replaced/updated on a technological life-cycle basis.
William H. Graves ([email protected]) is Professor of Mathematics and Professor of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is currently serving as interim Chief Information Officer in a new position that consolidates all of the University's central information technology services (http://www.unc.edu/campus/its/). He also founded and is responsible for the University's Institute for Academic Technology, a national educational technology center supported since 1989 by IBM (http://www.iat.unc.edu/). He is an elected member of the CAUSE Board of Directors.
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