Wireless Campus
The Challenge: Creating a wireless environment for our community colleges
Maintaining computing and communications infrastructure is a significant cost to our educational system. Computer labs provide everyone with access to the Internet, but they are expensive to keep up to date.
Community colleges are straining under reduced budgets and increasing demand, especially from workers transitioning into new and emerging areas for the Silicon Valley economy, such as bio-tech and nano-tech.
Meanwhile, new, high-speed, wireless communications technologies appear to be a cost-effective way to provide students, faculty and staff with access to schools’ networks and to the Internet. WiFi (802.11) can provide short range access in classrooms, libraries and meeting rooms. WiMax (802.16), when it arrives in late 2006, will be able to connect buildings and provide outdoor access for mobile users.
Colleges are putting more of their instruction on-line. More and more classes use a combination of classroom time for the more difficult concepts and on-line sessions for less complex material and discussions. Students are bringing laptop computers to campus for note taking, research, and homework preparation.
While a number of residential colleges around the country have built campus-wide networks, on the campuses of our community colleges wireless is constrained to a few hotspots. Working collaboratively with the colleges and tech companies, can Smart Valley build a wireless cloud over the community colleges?
Project Concept
The Foothill-DeAnza Community College District plans to pilot the use of a campus-wide wireless network. Students will be encouraged to bring laptop computers to campus, allowing the school to close computer labs. More classes will include an on-line component. The project will demonstrate how community colleges can play a major role in rebuilding the Valley’s fiscal foundation and in broadening technology use in every day lives.
Technical volunteers recruited from the Wireless Communications Alliance are reducing the cost of the project by assisting with the design of the network and with the installation of the equipment.
Lessons learned from the Foothill DeAnza project and from other community colleges will be shared with all of the community colleges in Silicon Valley to help them develop and accelerate their plans for deployment.
Benefits
The wireless network will allow the District to dramatically increase technology access for its students. Currently, students must use either the limited number of computer workstations and labs on campus, or bring their own. The closing of the computer labs will help Foothill College reduce its $3 - $5 million annual information technology budget. Some of the savings will be used to provide computers with wireless cards and wireless Personal Digital Appliances to those who can not afford them.
Accessing the wireless network will be more convenient than accessing the wireline network, allowing connections in classrooms, meeting rooms, library stacks, offices, and in open spaces. The campus will also become a resource for members of the community needing high-speed network access.
The network will support the growth of on-line learning programs. On-line class sessions will reduce the need for classroom time, allowing the College to offer additional classes and increase the size of the student body.
Students will become accustomed to working with information and communications technologies, increasing their value to Silicon Valley employers.
There will be many challenges to designing the wireless network, addressing security and privacy concerns, and creating the tools to make it work seamlessly with laptop computers and palmtop appliances. Lessons learned from the pilot project with Foothill College will help other institutions of higher learning, and eventually K-12 schools, develop their strategies.
Project Plan
Phase I - Plan the project, meet with technology vendors, create a budget, identify sources of funds and equipment
Phase II - Install the network, train staff and students, adapt curriculum
Phase III - Document, announce, and share the results.
Partners
Foothill College
Foothill DeAnza Community College District Information Technology Department
Wireless Communications Alliance
Go Networks
Stuart Jeffery, Seena Consulting
Current Status
Foothill College is preparing a request for quotation for wireless equipment. Volunteers are conducting a site survey. When the equipment arrives, Smart Valley will help recruit volunteers to assist with the installation fo the indoor equipment.
For more information
Gay Krause, 650-949-7113,
Seth Fearey, 408-278-2220,
More about Foothill Community College and its role in the Silicon Valley
Foothill has already established itself as a leader in educational technology. In 1995, the college became the first educational institution in the state, if not nationally, to offer a credit course online. It also developed its own online course management software long before commercial products were available. Foothill is the only community college associated with the national Sakai Project, an open source course management consortium involving Stanford University, M.I.T., the University of Michigan, and Indiana University.
Community colleges serve a major role in providing access to education and technology for students. These are the same students who are or will become the workforce. As new industries emerge, e.g. biotechnology and nanotechnology, and other industries fade, the workforce needs new skills. Silicon Valley’s community colleges play a vital role in smoothing the business cycles brought on by the ever-changing challenges and opportunities created by the global economy.
Furthermore, community colleges play a significant role in reducing the digital divide. In serving over 1.5 million students in California, and over 130,000 students in the Silicon Valley, community colleges are well positioned to increase access to the newest applications in technology.
Foothill and De Anza Colleges enrolled 43,500 students in 2005 – one in every six adults in its district (Palo Alto, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Stanford, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, and Cupertino). The average age of students is 35 years. One third of students are adults learning a new workforce skill. A wireless campus at Foothill College will enable the college to dramatically increase technology access to more adults.