This panel will focus on leading-edge planning, strategy and technology to reach rural, remote and underserved audiences. A particular focus will be wireless Internet and the importance of connecting the Internet2 efforts with the requirements in rural areas of less than 25,000 and inner cities. Implications for global knowledge networks will be explored and management and business strategies including finances and costs will be included. Poley will introduce the vision and organizational dimensions and Cotton and Kimsey will discuss the technology and its importance to university outreach and extension.

SUMMARY PAGE

The American Distance Education Consortium (ADEC) is working on several distance education projects designed to reach rural/remote Americans with higher speed and increased bandwidth learning opportunities. These efforts, being initiated by ADEC's 60 member institutions, Internet2 partners, Tachyon and NSF, will experiment over the next three years with satellite based Internet delivery. ADEC members are also actively involved with getting the message out that "distance education" should not be simply for the "near and the rich". Unfortunately, the whole notion of bringing the university to the people is not moving apace and services to communities of less than 25,000 people - remote by telephone company definition, historically black colleges and universities, Hispanic serving institutions, tribal lands and colleges and inner cities seem outside the bounds of all the hype. Janet Poley, ADEC President, presents the current situation with respect to trends and outlines a vision and strategy that should engage all universities and companies with a focus on the importance of reaching a larger proportion of the population with better services more inexpensively.

Dan Cotton, Head of Communication, Information and Technology within the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources (IANR) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, will present an overview of a technology strategy to be tested using satellite. He will also discuss the plans for testing, mentoring and applications development within this project. Cotton will describe the situation in Nebraska - a large geographic land mass, widely dispersed population, tribal colleges and agricultural base.

Ray Kimsey, North Carolina State University, will discuss the case of North Carolina where Raleigh-Durham is one of the top 10 most "connected" sites in the U.S. and yet the increase in connectivity has not yet reached the rural eastern and western parts of the state. Knowledge, finances and infrastructure constraints interact in creating disturbing blockages among those who most need digital education opportunities.

Dr. Janet K. Poley
President
American Distance Education Consortium (ADEC)
C218 AnS
P.O. Box 830952
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Lincoln, NE 68583-0952
402-472-7000 (Phone)
402-472-9060 (FAX)
[email protected] (E-Mail)

Slides will be available at http://www.adec.edu at the time of the presentation and may be linked or we will provide to Educause depending upon preference. There will be an HTML outline version.

POLEY PRESENTATION

Distance education is not a new concept - it has had an interesting history as largely a print-based enterprise. Originally, distance education was viewed as a way to embrace place-bound learners and many modalities were used to "take the university of the people". Universities including Wisconsin, Iowa State, Nebraska and Tuskegee used every available means to reach out to rural and remote locations within the boundaries of the state. Delivery mechanisms included trains, wagons, planes, postal services, newspapers, radio and television. The early history of the Cooperative Extension service documents that people even walked out and into the farms and rural communities of this nation to disseminate educational programs.

So where are we today? While certainly radio, television and postal services continue to play a large role in distance education, high expectations have been created in rural parts of the nation, as well as inner cities and poorer communities that educational opportunities via Internet will be implemented in the early spirit of distance education and embrace the underserved. At present, there is much talk about a "digital divide."

The Department of Commerce has followed and documented this "divide" and recently Bob Heterick wrote: "The digital divide we should be worrying about is the unhappily slow rollout and high cost of high-speed digital connectivity. To produce really compelling learning applications on line, we will most often require megabit access. At the current rollout rate of our phone companies' digital subscriber line technology and the cable companies' symmetrical broadband services, we will be severely limited in what we can design in the way of new learning environments for quite some time to come." He suggests that we get to work on "this" digital divide.

The American Distance Education Consortium (ADEC) which includes 60 member universities is implementing a strategy to call attention to the fact that the "rollout" Heterick refers to considers communities of 25,000 and below to be remote and largely outside of corporate development strategies. Historically Black Institutions, Hispanic serving institutions and Tribal Colleges and Communities are also "distant" from the largely money-driven deployment of these important networks.

ADEC member institutions are working with Internet2 partners, private sector partners and the National Science Foundation to explore wireless Internet possibilities via satellite - "pretty good Internet, pretty soon, pretty cheap" to quote Tachyon, the company wanting to bring Tachyon Access Points (TAPS) into rural and remote parts of the U.S. as well as to developing nations. Other wireless options such as the Local Multipoint Distribution Service (LMDS) being implemented by Virginia Tech and Wavtrace, the ADSL deployment and radio wireless for certain circumstances, should all be explored and ADEC intends to carry the message nationwide that distance education programs and processes should not be reserved for the near and the rich.

Trend data from a recent ADEC study of local Extension educators, the Department of Commerce trend information and that of PricewaterhouseCoopers, will be included. Information about a new wave of energy and ideas into American agriculture from new immigrants is also examined as it relates to key target populations for distance education.

Mr. Dan Cotton
Director of Communications & Information Technology
Institute of Agriculture & Natural Resources
University of Nebraska
Room 104, ACB
P.O. Box 830918
Lincoln, NE 68583-0918
402-472-2821 (Phone)
402-472-0025 (Fax)
[email protected] (E-Mail)

COTTON PRESENTATION

Nebraska is a large state comprised of 76,878 square miles, 93 counties and a state population of 1,662,719. Over a third of the counties have a population of less than 5,000 people, two-thirds of the counties have a population of less than 10,000, only eleven counties have a population greater than 25,000. Nebraska is basically a rural state with a strong agricultural economic base. The Institute of Agriculture & Natural Resources (IANR) at the University of Nebraska is the only in-state provider of agricultural and natural resources education in Nebraska. It maintains linkages with the four campuses of the University of Nebraska, Nebraska College of Technical Agriculture, 1994 land-grant institutions, state colleges, and community colleges. IANR alone generates over 35 distance education credit courses statewide as well as a number of non-credit offerings in agriculture, natural resources and human resources and family sciences. IANR's statewide infrastructure supports teaching, research and extension. Today there are 83 Cooperative Extension county offices, five research and extension centers, and relationships with a number of other program related sites throughout the state. It is important for the University and IANR to have good access to the Internet; and while the research and extension centers have T1 connectivity, over 50 locations have dial-up access, with the remaining sites connected through a 56K Frame Relay service. It is important for all University/IANR locations to have "pretty good Internet" in order to access the services and resources of the University, and to provide citizens access to quality distance education. The University has developed plans and continues to pursue better data services, but providing good access via terrestrial connections statewide remains a problem. Wireless Internet service could be very important in the state of Nebraska and in other states with similar land-grant university educational responsibilities.

A partnership with Tachyon.Net, an international high-performance Internet carrier service, presents a real option for providing "pretty good Internet" to ADEC members. Tachyon can provide a Tachyon Access Point (TAP) system, comprised of a small satellite antenna, a radio assembly, a small indoor unit, and cabling, at each ADEC end-user site, providing communication via geostationary satellite to a Tachyon Satellite Gateway, where the traffic is directly routed to high-performance Internet1 and Internet2 links. The TAP can connect to a LAN at the end-user site via standard Ethernet, providing end-to-end connectivity to the high-performance Internet backbone networks. The Tachyon system provides two-way communications for high-performance Internet access across the entire satellite footprint of the continental United States. Service over the network will be controlled by a differentiated Quality of Service (QoS) scheme which provides the optimal price/performance levels for each end-user site with the potential for dynamic allocation of network bandwidth. Tachyon has designed the service specifically to process "bursty" IP traffic as efficiently as possible, allowing a capacity of up to 45Mbps on the forward channel. The Tachyon network offers two-way satellite communications, with reverse channel rates of 256Kbps. Tachyon links are transmitted as soon as they are received with no delay for reestablishing the connection. The high data rates reduce the duration of each transmission, minimizing the delay between request and response. Underlying this technique is a highly efficient patented link management methodology, and an enhanced over-the-air protocol, with standard TCP/IP on each end. Land-grant institutions are in need of such technology to fully realize the potential that "pretty good Internet" can provide. A schedule has been developed to test the technology and to evaluate the impact on program delivery.

Mr. Ray Kimsey
Rural Informatics Specialist
North Carolina State University
P.O. Box 7641
Raleigh, NC 27695-7641
919-515-8449 (Phone)
919-515-3777 (Fax)
[email protected] (E-Mail)

KIMSEY PRESENTATION

The number of users accessing the Internet from home has increased dramatically in the past several years (1999 PricewaterhouseCoopers, Consumer Technology Survey). This increase in connectivity is evident in the Piedmont of North Carolina where the Raleigh-Durham area is one of the top 10 most "connected" sites in the U.S. (April 1999, Headcount.com, Profile of the U.S. User). However, this increase in connectivity has not yet reached the more rural eastern and western parts of the state.

Financial barriers to reaching the more rural remote areas have been well established. These include:

� Higher expenses for providing services in remote areas.

� Larger percentage of low income families that in general have lower usage rates for the Internet.

� Less exposure to the Internet in schools and at work.

These reasons produce little incentive for traditional ISP's to reach to the remote areas. Newer services such as cable modems, ISDN and ADSL also have not reached these areas and are predicted to be at least several years away before they will become viable alternatives. A variety of small town telephone companies scattered throughout the state also further complicate the picture. Satellite and wireless technology may be a better choice.

To bring the Internet to county and state government agencies, the state has created an agency to provide connectivity to all local and state agencies. The North Carolina Cooperative Extension Service has relied on this service for our local county offices for the past three years. This service provides 56 Kbps lines to each local office and T1 lines to remote research centers. It was originally thought that the cost for these services would drop and all offices would be moved to at least the equivalent of T1 connectivity. Due to telephone tariff structures in North Carolina, this has not been the case.