Copyright 1998 CAUSE. From CAUSE/EFFECT Volume 20, Number 4, Winter 1997-98, pp. 34-37. 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 Jim Roche at CAUSE, 4840 Pearl East Circle, Suite 302E, Boulder, CO 80301 USA; 303-939-0308; e-mail: [email protected]
Located on 350 acres in the rural town of Cedarville, Ohio, Cedarville College is closely affiliated with the Baptist Church. Established in 1887, the institution enrolls more than 2,500 students, most of whom live on campus. It is a college of arts, sciences, and professional programs, offering seventy-five areas of study.
Over the last five years, Cedarville has seen admissions applications and enrollment increase dramatically, and has welcomed campus visits from more than one hundred institutions. Much of this increased attention on the small college is due to its establishment of a successful network.
Cedarville officials explain that what people applaud is that the community actually uses the extensive infrastructure that Cedarville put into place. David Rotman, director of Computer Services, says that it didn't take long for everyone to see value in the network. He explained, "We had strong support from the president, faculty bought in early, and students quickly followed."
Consistent with its objectives to "prepare students to knowledgeably participate in society," and to "provide sufficient opportunities for students to practice the skills of communication," Cedarville has long made networking a priority. In the 1989-90 academic year, President Paul Dixon appointed a task team of fifteen members, including faculty, staff, and administration, to evaluate Cedarville's technology needs and formulate a plan to address them.
In an intense planning effort, the task team gathered input from its community as well as outside institutions, and was impressed by large-scale networking projects that incorporated residence halls. The team proposed that the college set up an integrated, broadly accessible information, voice, and video communications technology infrastructure, and that proposal was validated through a survey of the student body, a study project with the faculty, and external consulting. Funding, they suggested, would be generated through student fees.
The resulting network, CedarNet, has been implemented in phases and consists of more than 1,600 networked workstations. All of the one thousand residence hall rooms and more than 300 offices have college-owned computers, and each dorm room contains a college-owned printer. Students and faculty have direct access to the Internet and the Web, as well as to more than 150 software applications, including such specific packages as an online Bible and surgical care. Dixon explained, "Our philosophy was one of making information available to people who need it when they need it and where they need it."
Cedarville boasts heavy emphasis on technology in instruction, and rightfully so. The college has configured twenty of its fifty classrooms with complete multimedia support: computer, Sharp video projector, Elmo visual presenter, VCR, audio-CD player, audio-cassette player, wireless mouse, and in some, a laser disc player. Four additional multimedia support systems are mobile, and several LCD projection panels and large-screen monitors are available for presentations. Four classrooms are configured as computer laboratories, in which all computers can be controlled by the instructor.
Students and faculty also have access to digital cameras, a slide scanner, a film recorder, several flatbed scanners, and video-capture equipment, as well as color printing for a fee.
To fund the network, students pay an additional $750 per academic year, which is now included in their general fees. The funding plan includes a four-year equipment replacement cycle, maintenance of hardware and software, and hiring of network personnel. The college spent more than $1.6 million on the network in 1996-97, or 4.6 percent of its annual expenditures, and expects to match that figure for 1997-98.
CedarNet's impact on the college community is most apparent in communications and in instruction, say college administrators. Rotman notes that 95 percent of faculty and 90 percent of students use e-mail every day, which has enhanced faculty-student communications. In addition, targeted information is often accessed through the network, including both general information, such as course-section availability, and individual data, such as transcripts.
Technology in the classroom has caught on quickly due to the high quality and accessibility of equipment and the Internet. Faculty are incorporating Internet use into course requirements, and students are following suit by including Internet materials in research papers and presentations. With the help of faculty incentive grants, several professors are developing extended resources for classroom use in areas such as plant taxonomy and communications in the information age.
Dixon notes that another popular area of CedarNet is the library resources section, explaining, "Through OhioLINK, students can access library catalogs and order materials from more than fifty Ohio college and university libraries from their dorm rooms twenty-four hours a day." Access is also provided to a variety of CD-ROM-based indexes, including full-text newspapers and application-specific databases. He adds, "Since CedarNet is based on a microcomputer architecture, these CD-ROM applications function at all workstations with the same full graphics as computers in the library itself."
Looking toward the future, Rotman says Cedarville will maintain its existing infrastructure and pursue and promote software variety. The college will work "to develop in-house operations for use on the network, and will enhance faculty use of the network by providing additional skills and background," he says. A former chapel is currently being converted to a technology center that will include several labs and computer classrooms.
As the community continues to investigate opportunities within the existing infrastructure, the influence of the network deepens. For example, Rotman says, "faculty are experimenting with using distance learning methodologies in their classrooms." Professors place class notes online and require students to review the notes on their own time. This allows more classroom time to be devoted to the communication that Cedarville is proudest of: faculty-student interaction.
Recalling that students were initially skeptical of the proposed network at Cedarville College, President Paul Dixon describes CedarNet as pervasive and notes that everyone in the community, students included, is applauding its benefits. "Few of our students -- or faculty or staff, for that matter -- see a day go by without using the system. Using the network at Cedarville has become as essential as using the telephone or post office." In his twenty years at the college, he hasn't seen interpersonal communications better than they are today. He says: "CedarNet has actually enhanced, rather than replaced, the close faculty-student relationships for which Cedarville is known."
Dixon attributes Cedarville's success in networking to a progressive, long-term commitment to technology while maintaining a theological approach. He explains that CedarNet is in sync with the college's mission, which embraces the objective "to increase the student's awareness of the world of ideas and events which are influencing our contemporary culture, and to prepare the student to knowledgeably participate in our society." To boost even further the exceptional quality of CedarNet, Dixon says the focus for the next few years will be on people -- helping everyone make even better use of the technology at their fingertips.
With a 2,500-acre main campus surrounded by rolling pastures and the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University enrolls more than 25,000 students. This land-grant university, commonly known as Virginia Tech, was founded in 1872. Through the last thirty-five years it has changed from a small military school known for agriculture and traditional engineering to a major scientific research center.
Virginia Tech boasts 200 degree programs and $148 million in research projects each year, and ranks among the top institutions in industry-supported research. The university has twenty-three interdisciplinary research centers -- some among the best in their fields -- ranging from the Fiber and Electro-Optics Research Center to the Virginia Center for Coal and Energy Research, in addition to dozens of research institutes and hundreds of research laboratories.
Today, a state-of-the-art communications system -- including nearly 2,000 miles of optical fiber, 15,000 Ethernet connections, and more than 14,000 data and voice devices -- links almost every dorm room, lab, office, and classroom to computers, audio, and video data, as well as to the Internet and to national research networks. Virginia Tech's expansive campus is the nucleus for a statewide network called Net.Work.Virginia.
Virginia Tech has consistently held a lead position in the field of technology while maintaining a cost-effective approach. The campus began networking in the mid 1970s, providing mainframe access for a select group of researchers and administrators with the installation of the first automatic data switch in North America, Develcon DataSwitch. The school began to install Sytex LocalNet20 in the early 1980s, giving connectivity to around 3,000 users, the largest such installation of its time.
A major tunnel fire took out part of the LocalNet system in the mid 1980s, but at that time the university was installing a pilot Ethernet system for a portion of the campus. LocalNet was supplemented by UNINET, offering network access to the campus from anywhere in the state. The progressive campus soon became one of the first institutions in the nation to provide off-campus access to an on-campus mainframe.
Judy Lilly, Director of Communications Network Services (CNS), notes that an important economy of scale took place when CNS was created in 1984, consolidating voice, data, and video communications. This move, combined with the addition of a vice president for information systems, created an effective organizational structure able to rapidly and efficiently evolve and integrate systems.
In 1986, CNS documented every piece of existing cable on campus, and university personnel installed a structured cable plant, planning to fulfill future requirements. In 1988, CNS implemented an ROLM CBX voice/data system, which became the largest system of its type. In the early 1990s, a Fiber-Distributed Data Interface Backbone was installed.
Today Virginia Tech continues to lead the field with effective, strategic network design. In 1996, CNS completed implementation of one of the first campuswide Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) backbones, built on a foundation of fiber laid in the 1980s. With this infrastructure, CNS can match the desktop connection to application requirements extending 10-100 Mbps Ethernet, 25 Mbps ATM, or 155 Mbps ATM wherever needed.
Meeting individual needs within an entire university is a big job, Lilly explains, and the key is keeping in touch with all areas of the community. Free e-mail service, Web hosting services, and access to support personnel are offered to all members of the university community. She says that technology has had an enormous impact on instruction at Virginia Tech, assisted significantly by the Faculty Development Initiative. This effort to increase computer literacy among faculty has reached approximately 90 percent of its intended audience through summer institutes over the past five years.
But the institution believes good service is important to more than its immediate community. Combining its leadership in technology with its motto, "Ut prosim," or "That I may serve," Virginia Tech is well known for its network outreach programs.
In collaboration with Old Dominion University and the Virginia Community College System, Virginia Tech led a project to develop statewide access to advanced digital communications services. The project resulted in the high-capacity ATM network, Net.Work.Virginia. The broadband network includes an Internet gateway open to all participants, and can handle simultaneous transmission of interactive voice, data, and video services. The network brings the citizens of Virginia into a new era of teaching and learning. With the establishment within Net.Work.Virginia of perhaps the first operational Internet2 gigaPOP with operational gateways to the National Science Foundation's vBNS network and the Department of Energy's ESnet, Virginia Tech extends its leadership in next-generation communications systems on a national scale.
In 1991, exploring ways to bring its campuswide network to off-campus homes and offices, Virginia Tech decided to offer Internet access to everyone in its home town. Together with the Town of Blacksburg and Bell Atlantic of Virginia, the institution created the world's first electronic village, offering access to all the town's citizens in 1993 and garnering international attention. Today, Virginia Tech President Paul Torgersen says, two-thirds of the town's 36,000 residents use the Internet.
Virginia Tech is consistently involved in research initiatives, such as a recent study conducted with the Information Technology Association of America on information technology worker shortages. The university, together with eight other institutions, is also researching strategies for assessing an academic networked environment, a project led by the Coalition for Networked Information.
In mapping its future, Virginia Tech plans to remain a leader in the world it knows so well. Torgersen hopes that the institution will soon break ground on an Advanced Communications and Information Technologies Center, which will combine communications teaching and research with instructional technology research and development. And for the fall 1998 semester, students will be required to purchase PCs and software packages.
Lilly notes, "We have a great deal of visibility with peer institutions around the world, and we welcome visitors one to three times a week who come to see what we're doing. It's been really exciting and rewarding. We don't set limitations on what we can do; we just look to the horizon."
Virginia Tech has much to be proud of in the realm of technology, but President Paul Torgersen believes that its most important role is simply to enhance the quality of instruction for undergraduates. While an impact is already evident in the classroom, he says that at this point most of the evidence is anecdotal, filtering in through faculty comments. "Over time, within half a dozen years, we will see dramatic improvements in our ability to teach and in students' ability to learn." Torgersen cites the Faculty Development Initiative as an example of the school's commitment to incorporate technology in the classroom. He says, "We've worked consciously and deliberately to bring faculty to some level of computer literacy." Another example is Cyberschool -- an experiment to redesign course offerings to incorporate discoveries about instructional technologies and the way students learn.
Torgersen explains Virginia Tech's long-time leadership in the field of information technology, "Technology has gotten into the way we think. We ask ourselves what's next, and whatever's next, we do." He notes that leadership in networking and information technology is a niche that the university fills naturally. "It's something we can do well, so we ought to do it."
The two institutions featured in this article are winners of the 1997 CAUSE Awards for Excellence in Campus Networking. These awards, sponsored by Novell, Inc., recognize colleges and universities that demonstrate outstanding utilization of campus networks. Cedarville College was named the 1997 winner in Category 1, for institutions with E&G budgets under $100 million, and Virginia Tech received the award in Category 2, E&G budgets over $100 million.
Applications and information regarding the 1998 award can be found at http://www.cause.org/pd/awards/network/network-award.html. The deadline for 1998 applications is March 13, 1998.
CAUSE/EFFECT's Campus Profile department regularly focuses on the information resources environment -- information, technology, and services -- of a CAUSE member institution, to promote a better understanding of how information resources are organized, managed, planned for, and used in colleges and universities of various sizes and types. These articles were written by CAUSE Writer/Reporter Shannon Burgert, based on interviews and the CAUSE Networking Award applications of these two institutions.
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