Communications Crossroads - Summer 2008 - (Page 18)

ROLFES SAYS THERE ARE CONCERNS, ALSO, WITH ADOPTION RATES. “EDUCATORS OFTEN HAVE VERY LITTLE TIME TO LEARN ABOUT NEW TECHNOLOGIES.” HIS SUGGESTION? TELECOMS SHOULD TAKE SOME INITIATIVE THEMSELVES, HELPING MEMBERS OF THE EDUCATION COMMUNITY BY DOING DEMOS OF THE NEWEST INNOVATIONS. Classrooms, Educators and Students Statewide) program with 24 pilot schools in January of 2006. Today, 170 of the state’s 400 high schools are connected. “If it is funded as requested for the next two years,” says Geraldine Tibbs, director of Communications and Public Relations for the Madison County School District, “ACCESS Distance Learning will be able to provide 21st-century classrooms for every Alabama high school and serve 45,000 students statewide.” The program’s creation was prompted by an education crisis not unlike those in other states. “Rural, small and large schools alike could not offer courses—in areas such as foreign language, high-level mathematics, AP courses—due to a lack of students requesting them and a lack of qualiﬁed teachers to teach them,” says Tibbs. ACCESS became the avenue to growing young minds that would otherwise have gone without. Linking Alabama classrooms and students via broadband technology, ACCESS gives them Web-based and interactive video-conferencing, three regional support centers to hire, train and support e-teachers, and statewide coordination, scheduling and support for distance learning. “Students are able to take classes they wouldn’t have otherwise,” says Tibbs, whose ﬁve district high schools all enjoy the beneﬁts of ACCESS. “Course offerings allow them to be more prepared for college or the workforce, and all of the schools in the network can interact with other schools.” ACCESS allows them to pool their expertise and share ideas for a stronger overall system. “The students enjoy a variety of course offerings in hard-to-ﬁnd disciplines, they can earn advanced diplomas, and those transferring in now have a new tool to help them graduate where before they might not have.” Rolfes, in Nebraska, sees similar results on a larger scale in the state’s smaller rural schools. “If this level of distance learning did not happen, given the great geographic distance between districts, students would need to be on buses for many hours per day or risk not graduating by not fulﬁlling the minimum graduation requirements or not being able to fulﬁll college entrance requirements.” Some districts have taken the idea up a notch. “[They are] offering many dual-credit and concurrent credit course offerings from higher education entities,” says Rolfes, “so that some enterprising seniors graduate from high school with as many as 15 or more college credit hours.” And since the average cost for one year of college in 2007-08 was more than $6,000 at a public four-year school, and more than $23,000 at a private institution—15 credit hours equals nearly a semester’s worth of tuition money in the bank. So broadband is saving money. But evolving technology also costs money, a fact that’s not lost on educators as they seek budgets. “What bandwidth will be required for small-to-medium schools in 2015?” asks Rolfes. “No one knows, but rest assured that it will be more than two coupled T-1s! All of the new Web 2.0 applications are beginning to put a strain on schools’ current Internet access.” “Public schools are under the most challenging and restrictive tax and budget controls ever,” he says, “and any unusually large increase in costs in one area throws their budgets into a tailspin. With negotiated personnel costs accounting for over 85 percent of a district’s budget, school boards and administrators are challenged to make cuts in other program areas to make up for other necessities.” While Nebraska’s plans for the future, like Alabama’s, see highbandwidth connectivity as the 18 COMMUNICATIONS CROSSROADS www.ustelecom.org http://www.ustelecom.org

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Communications Crossroads - Summer 2008

Communications Crossroads - Summer 2008 Up Front Contents TeleBites Delivering the Broadband Future Deriving Revenue from Today's Broadband World The Right Way to Operate Data Centers Buyers' Guide Industry Calendar Advertisers DotCom Index to Advertisers Straight Talk

Communications Crossroads - Summer 2008

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