Schools of the future

by Melissa Hancock on Thursday, 11 January 2007

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Digital learning: Maryland, USA’s 26,000 students from 33 schools are benefiting from the online programme.

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Money saver: Devkota says that the new network has cut thousands of dollars in school expenses.

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The Knowledge: Cisco, IBM and VitalSource have joined forces to produce data warehousing and digitised textbooks to aid students and teachers.

All schools share one challenge in common — they must balance achieving ambitious academic goals with equally important business management requirements. Charles County Public Schools (CCPS) in Maryland, USA, was just another school struggling to maintain that balance. As James E Richmond, the CCPS’s superintendent recalls: “When I became superintendent ten years ago, I was facing a US$1.5m deficit. In the ten years since, we have never had a deficit.” So what changed ten years ago?

In 1996, CCPS partnered with networking giant Cisco Systems to become a Cisco Connected Learning School District. Dubbed a ‘digital school’, CCPS deployed a network infrastructure based on the Cisco Service-Oriented Network Architecture (SONA) framework to deliver a network platform that enables a wide range of services. The Internet Protocol (IP) communications network connects the district’s 33 schools, serving approximately 26,000 children with wireless high-bandwidth links of two Gbps, which enables reliable, high-performing voice, video, and on-demand services.

With the network infrastructure in place, applications and resources that could utilise the network were standardised throughout the system. Cisco built a custom-designed data warehouse in partnership with IBM that enables teachers and administrators to see the progress of students and target students that may need additional assistance. Cisco also worked with VitalSource to create digitised textbooks and resources to distribute to teachers in secondary classes.

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An online environment for all staff was created called ‘Desire2Learn’ which enables students to supplement classroom instruction and access numerous online digital resources. Distributed video conferencing units were installed throughout the school system which can be used for both distance learning classes and video field trips. Add to this LCD projectors at a ratio of 1:2.3 classrooms, and teachers can compile and share with all students a diverse lesson utilising all modes of learning. The integration of all the latest technology working in tandem in all classrooms has created this new digital school environment which helps to ensure enhanced learning and teaching.

Aside from achieving academic excellence, Cisco’s programme has enabled CCPS to reduce costs, freeing up more money to be re-invested back into the classrooms. “We have had five or six budget balances in ten years, totaling several million dollars, that we have been able to reinvest right back into the school system. In the past eight years we have moved the district forward in almost every imaginable way,” reflects Richmond.

This is because Cisco eliminated the majority of the district’s analog phone lines and instead deployed voice services over the network (VoIP) which saved CCPS approximately US$170,000 in the first year alone.

Bijaya Devkota, Central Information Officer (CIO) for CCPS who led the implementation of the network, says “not only has it saved CCPS thousands of dollars per month", but through enabling the provision of IP telephony to all classrooms, today the school district delivers many times the number of services delivered previously.

Through the deployment of a phone-based application called KIDS (Knowledge Information Delivery System) which runs on 3,600 Cisco IP phones throughout CCPS, voice and data have been integrated in a creative way which has allowed CCPS to operate more efficiently and effectively. For example, one of the features allows teachers to take attendance and if a child is absent, the teacher can automatically access contact information for parents from a central database and call to find out whether the child is ill or simply late.

The information is also useful if a child becomes sick during the day. “We’ve set it up to show the parents’ home phone, work phone, or home address,” explains Devkota, “That way, the teacher can contact the parents quickly.” The same profile reveals whether the child has allergies or another medical condition that requires special treatment.

CCPS’s previous phone system was based on an aging Private Branch Exchange that severely limited simultaneous calls to and from any of its schools. Another advantage of KIDS is its broadcast feature which CCPS currently uses to broadcast messages over the telephone displays during the day. Using the profiles built into the application, staff can page any subset of a school’s population, such as all science teachers, all classrooms in a particular wing, or all phones on campus.

Schools can set up KIDS to deliver additional features, including staff-directory information, event calendars, and time card tracking.

And arguably one of the biggest benefits of the new technology is the heightened security it offers.

Teachers have on-screen access to the student database via their XML-enabled Cisco 7940G or 7960G IP phones — which help keep current students’ emergency contact data, whereas in the past, this information was not always up to date.

Also by integrating its email system with Cisco’s Unified CallManager’s E-911 feature, an emergency 911 call from a school automatically generates an email that arrives at the response centre in real time. The email gives the response centre the exact location of where that call is coming from within the school — a capability that is much needed by CCPS which has 3000 classrooms with IP phones spread out over a large 400 sq mile county.

In addition, many administrators have Wi-Fi-enabled IP phones so they can be reached even when they’re not at their desks. If the 911 call is a mistake, the caller can reach a central number to notify security officials. In this way, Cisco has helped CCPS solve an array of problems that had existed for years.

However, implementing the programme is time-consuming — Devkota says it took about two years to complete implementation at CCPS because each of the new phones had to be individually wired from classroom to classroom, and from school to school.

And of course, even when the programme is fully implemented, that is not ‘job done’. The full potential of the technology can only be realised if the teachers know how to make optimal use of it. According to research carried out by Cisco, technology can make the biggest difference if teachers use it as a vehicle for instruction rather than using it as an afterthought. This in itself represents a big cultural challenge, which as Devkota points out, can only be overcome by training: “Understanding the needs of the users and developing a system that enables them to work more efficiently is essential, but if they have difficulty using it you’ve lost the battle. Merely creating a technology-advanced environment is not enough — ensuring to include staff training as a part of the implementation is the only way to get users to embrace the technology,” he explains. Yet one thing is for sure — CCPS’s positive and tangible results to date serve as a barometer to show the potential success digital schools can have.

In 1996, CCPS was ranked 20th out of 20 metropolitan Washington DC schools in terms of challenging students to take advanced placement courses. Today it ranks 11th out of 29 systems. In addition, research in 2006 showed that CCPS has SAT scores that lead state and national averages. Almost 80% of students pursue some type of post-graduate education, and the class of 2006 was offered more than US$40m in college scholarships.

CCPS is also one of the fastest growing school systems in Maryland, and future plans include the building of one new school annually for the next 17 years.

Cisco is clearly not about to rest on its laurels, and are already looking to add new features to the current infrastructure: “We are currently researching different components to add to our IP telephony system that will enable us to communicate more efficiently throughout the school system.

But we are also always looking for new wireless devices so we are refining components on both the IP and wireless side."

Aside from improving the existing technology, Devkota tells Arabian Business of his eagerness to bring digital schools to the Middle East.

“Although we do not actively market our solution, IBM has been our main point of contact for reaching out to other schools to demonstrate our digital projects.”

Kirsten Schroeder, IBM partner, explains that they have their eyes on Qatar in particular: “The Supreme Education Council in Qatar have asked IBM to implement a data warehouse solution that delivers demographic and performance data about the student population so that educators can better refine instructional programmes to meet the evolving educational requirements of the emirate. We see that Qatar is one of the leaders in education in the region as it deploys new transactional systems to manage the day-to-day school system operations. It plans to deploy the data warehouse to provide a decision support system to support process improvements and benchmark outcomes in the classroom. IBM believes that educational systems in other countries in the Middle East will begin to deploy a similar strategy.”

Devkota believes this is only the beginning for digital schools. “Digital schools are the future of education.

This is easily seen in many higher education programmes that have moved towards utilising technology and digital resources in their programmes of study, whether it be laptops with resources for students or online courses. This will continue over the next few decades.”

Indeed, Cisco’s Connected Learning for Schools is a model that can be translated across schools and countries and considering its success to date and the rising popularity of IP-based networks as a form of integrated management, it seems only inevitable that Cisco’s involvement with education will increase.

Devkota is certainly not finished yet, insisting: “We’ve barely scratched the surface of what we can do with this new system and bandwidth.”

The rise and rise of VoIP

With the rapid growth of IP-based networks, VoIP is becoming increasingly popular for the following reasons:

• There are at least 10 times more telephones in the world than computers.

• Users of Microsoft's Instant Messenger based VoIP services can travel anywhere in the world and make and receive phone calls.

• IP phones combine the most crucial capabilities of phones, pagers, and computers, in that they can be used for signaling, voice communication, and data communication.

• The applications initially developed for IP phones encompass two and sometimes three of these capabilities, and they are being deployed in places where phones are more logical, convenient, or simply ubiquitous than traditional desktop computers.

• According to 2005 research, 36% of large organisations were already using VoIP products and services.

VoIP in the Emirates

• The UAE’s Telecoms Regulatory Authority (TRA) insists that VoIP technology providers must be licensed like any other telco. VoIP is currently blocked in the UAE but pressure is building on both government-owned telcoms operator Etisalat and the TRA to allow both businesses and individual customers access to use VoIP technology. In this respect, the UAE lags significantly behind other Middle East countries, such as Jordan, that has boasted a competitive and dynamic telecoms market for a number of years.

• In the summer of 2006, a survey of nearly 1000 key decision makers attending Middle East roadshows, Avaya Inc. (an American telecommunications company which specialises in VoIP) found that 71% are ready to deploy internet telephony solutions, including 55% who have already converged voice and data networks in place.

• Many are predicting an announcement of gradual deregulation of VoIP in early 2007. In response, Etisalat has said that it intends to launch its own VoIP services in the near future.

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