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In June 2002, the Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA) updated data on bandwidth provision to Australian schools. The bandwidth available to schools varies between states and territories. Different schools have access to connections that vary in speed from dial-up modem, through ISDN (the most common form of connection), to ADSL and in some rare instances, cable and satellite. In most States and Territories, the majority of schools have either 64 kbps or 128 kbps ISDN lines. In Western Australia the majority of schools currently have 64 kbps dial on demand internet connections while schools in the Northern Territory have 400 kbps satellite connections.

In August 2001 the Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs (DETYA) commissioned a study into bandwidth arrangements for the Australian education and training sector. The report suggests that schools require a minimum of 2 Mbps to be in a position to take advantage of increasingly bandwidth hungry educational applications, and argued that 10 Mbps is needed to cater for video streaming technologies. There is a considerable disparity between the broadband requirements recommended in this report and current data transfer speeds in schools.

All states and territories are pursuing strategies to increase bandwidth provision in schools. These include the progressive rollout of 2 Mbps to schools in the ACT and NSW. In Western Australia, the rollout has commenced to provide 10 Mbps connections to metropolitan schools, 2 Mbps connections to regional high schools and 512 kbps connections to regional primary schools.

In July 2001, MCEETYA established an ICT in Schools Taskforce. Its terms of reference include working with the Australian ICT in Education Committee (AICTEC) on issues relating to information and communication technologies (ICT) in teaching and learning. The Taskforce has identified broadband in education as a priority area and it will be a focus at the July 2002 meeting of MCEETYA.

Access to broadband

At its first meeting, the BAG considered a definition of broadband as: always on access to digital content provided by a range of fixed line, wireless and satellite technologies to higher bandwidths capable of supporting qualitatively different new and innovative content and applications and the delivery of enhanced services.

By this or any other widely accepted definition, most Australian schools do not have any broadband access. The capacity provided by the ISDN connections most schools use do not readily support 'qualitatively different new and innovative content and applications'. However, these ISDN lines do allow access to fast internet for multiple users within a school and for networked administration functions. In many cases, ISDN connections have given schools a taste for what they might achieve with greater bandwidth.

The Essendon North Primary School in Victoria is an example of ISDN use. The school is connected to the internet by a 192 kbps ISDN connection. It is one of the most advanced public primary schools in Victoria in terms of ICT use. Each classroom in the school has four PCs and the teacher's laptop connected to the school's network. Students primarily use the internet to research topics of interest. However, there is not sufficient bandwidth to access bandwidth intensive online learning applications, although the school recognises the benefits to students of these programs if the bandwidth were available. A faster data transfer speed would also let students interact and collaborate on projects with children from other schools and countries.

Some initiatives currently in progress aim to increase broadband capacity in schools. Certain impediments discussed later in this paper mean that many schools are not currently in a position to improve their access to broadband and the applications that broadband would enable. Many schools that are upgrading their bandwidth still cannot access broadband applications, because the number of connected devices reduces their effective bandwidth. Applications that are available to students internally are often unavailable through dial-up connections as they require more than a 64 kbps connection to run and most students do not have a broadband connection to their home.

Aggregation of Demand

Governments both in Australia and internationally have sought to aggregate demand in an attempt to address broadband access problems and to negotiate better levels of service and prices with carriers. Australian State governments have attempted to aggregate demand in a number of ways. For example, the Tasmanian Government has aggregated its entire communications spending, in the order of $30 million, and developed an agreement with Telstra through the Networking Tasmania program. This incorporates all government agencies including public and private schools, health facilities and local government, providing an agreed level of service with a value-added network. The Victorian government, through the VicOne program, has established a state-wide broadband telecommunications network to provide computer and multimedia connections to over 3,200 Victorian Government sites. The VicOne agreement with AAPT was predicated on demand aggregation - the Victorian Government agreed that government agencies will utilise the VicOne network, with each agency paying its own access fees.

Many State governments are seeking opportunities to aggregate demand across health and education, using them as "anchor tenants" to support the rollout of broadband infrastructure in regional areas. The NSW government has involved 17 schools in trials of various technologies providing enhanced services including use of State Rail fibre optic network, ADSL and cable. In the recent NSW budget, the government announced a commitment of $140 million over three years for capital projects to assist other ICT initiatives, particularly the expansion of network bandwidth. The Western Australian education department has aggregated demand specifically for the education sector and is currently implementing a program with Telstra to deliver dramatically improved broadband services to schools across the state.

Innovative educational projects in schools

Glen Waverley Secondary College Glen Waverley Secondary College (GWSC) in Melbourne's eastern suburbs represents the leading edge of ICT and internet use in schools. GWSC is a public secondary school with 1831 students from years 7 to 12. It was one of seven schools involved in the Victoria's Navigator Schools Project, which commenced in 1995.

GWSC spends approximately $700,000 annually on ICT, including the salaries of three technical support staff, 450 desktop computers and a laptop computer for each staff member. There is a computer presence in every classroom with additional computers located adjacent to most rooms.

GWSC has a substantial intranet. Approximately half of the intranet content is devoted to curriculum material, while the other half focuses on administration. All students have dial-in access to the school network and intranet, which allows them to work from home. The system allows parents to compare their child's progress in each class with peers. GWSC's innovative use of the intranet has dramatically increased the uptake of dial-up internet in student's homes. Five years ago approximately 50% of students had home internet access, now almost 100% of students have home internet access.

Scholastic achievement has improved for GWSC over the last 6 years through the use of ICT, an increased focus on effective teaching methods and improving the relationships between students and their teachers. This school demonstrates the potential advantages that ICT and broadband can offer to schools.

Caulfield Grammar School

Caulfield Grammar School is a co-educational school with more than 2,650 primary and secondary students based on three campuses in Melbourne. The school's computer network, established in 1997, joined together each campus to provide Internet access, e-mail and file management facilities utilizing ISDN transmission links. Local area networks distributed these services to classrooms, libraries and staff within each campus.

Anticipating a rapid increase in demand for network bandwidth, the inter-campus links were upgraded in 1999 to optical fibre using IP standards transferring data at 155 Mbps. Although currently limited by commercial agreement to 155 Mbps, the fibre links are equipped to 1 Gbps capacity although each campus LAN already operates up to 1 Gbps. Extensive use of packet shaping chokes external bandwidth to the Internet to 512 kbps which is currently carried via a Telstra DDS link.

The Caulfield Grammar optical fibre WAN infrastructure enables a Virtual Campus (VC) consisting of human and physical resources distributed across the physical campuses. Staff are being seconded to the VC to develop new online curriculum units. With greater external bandwidth over coming years, it is planned to extend the VC to encompass resources outside the school using streaming video, multimedia and collaborative software tools.

Use of broadband applications

Schools are well advanced with the integration of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) and e-learning into their curriculums, but the provision and use of high-speed broadband connections is at a relatively early stage. 'E-learning' initiatives encompass a wide set of applications and processes, using all available electronic media to deliver education. They include computer-based learning, web-based learning, virtual classrooms and digital collaboration. Online learning is a subset of these e-learning projects that uses the internet, intranets and extranets. Broadband technologies enable many of these online learning applications.

The South Australian School of the Air provides an example of innovative broadband application use. The school has used $325,000 from the Networking the Nation program to pilot a virtual classroom to service twenty of the most isolated families in the state. The School of the Air uses laptop computers connected via satellite to allow students to interact and work collaboratively on projects through features including a virtual whiteboard and virtual "breakout rooms" for smaller group work.

This project provides students with a quality of service not previously possible using two-way radio and allows the teachers to engage the students as a group. The feedback to date indicates that simply being able to hear each other properly has enormously improved interaction and increased the feeling of a real classroom. The service has also had flow-on benefits to the community. Parents have become internet literate while helping their children with school work and have been able to interact with others in their geographically dispersed community through the internet.

In contrast, many applications currently available for online learning are low bandwidth applications, primarily text based with Flash, video or Java inclusions. XSIQ provides a large range of online content for both primary and secondary school students. These online courses involve students reading accompanying text before completing a set exercise.

More bandwidth intensive applications such as Crocodile Chemistry allow students to conduct virtual experiments. Students can see the expected results before performing the experiment physically, promoting understanding and efficiency. Broadband applications such as Crocodile Chemistry have the additional advantage of enabling the teaching of scientific experiments and demonstrations that would otherwise be too dangerous or difficult to incorporate into the classroom. For example, experiments where combinations of chemicals explode can be safely demonstrated using applications, online video or multimedia clips.

Learning applications such as Galaxy Kids are also available for primary school students studying Maths and English. These applications offer animated stories, interactive learning activities and games as well as parental support modules. These programs teach children basic learning skills by reading them stories while highlighting the text, teaching children basic word association skills. The maths stories depict relationships between numbers, helping children to develop associations between maths and the real world and children also participate in simple arithmetic programs. All Galaxy Kids learning modules are complemented by interactive learning modules and games that reinforce learning as well as printable activity sheets.

The development of broadband content

The development of broadband education content is progressing at different rates in each state. The Commonwealth committed $34.1 million over five years to the development of a body of online curriculum content as part of Backing Australia's Ability. In July 2001, MCEETYA agreed to collaborate in this project and the states and territories matched the Commonwealth funding. This content is being developed under the banner of the Le@rning Federation. In addition, industry players in Australia and overseas (primarily in the United States) develop and market curriculum material and courseware designed for delivery over the internet. The industry is moving to the point where software is being designed assuming levels of bandwidth greater than those currently available in Australian schools. A trial is about to commence involving educational content exchange between the Le@rning Federation, Oklahoma Vision, OneNet (US) and AARNet, facilitated by AARNet's linkages with Internet2.

The current relatively low bandwidth available in schools places constraints on Australian educational content developers. Developers cannot assume their clients will have access to large bandwidth and so must develop applications to run on narrowband connections. For example, South Australia's Technology School of the Future (TSoF) runs a project that allows students to use robots located at the Australian Antarctic Davis Station to conduct remote telecontrol experiments. Students are able to work on a variety of Remote Sensing and Robotic challenges, operating the robots via the Internet. Students receive data and video capture from Antarctica and send revised programs to the robots. The TSoF has designed this program to work over a narrowband connection because of the small number of schools in Australia that currently have broadband connections.

The Virtual Schooling Service (VSS) offered by Education Queensland provides another example of the innovative use of broadband applications. The service offers upper secondary courses to students enrolled in state schools, where the provision of comprehensive subject options has traditionally been problematic. In some instances, the students are in schools outside the metropolitan area. In other cases, the students are in metropolitan schools, with small populations wanting to do particular academic units. The VSS offers a range of upper secondary courses. Classroom components of the service use a telephone hookup in concert with Microsoft Netmeeting on the PC.

The VSS has the capacity to deliver a broad curriculum across Queensland regardless of school size or location, but, even in its current form, it requires considerable bandwidth to operate effectively. Increased bandwidth would allow significant improvements to the educational outcomes this service can provide. In consultations with NOIE, VSS staff stated that they would prefer to use video conferencing technology to make the service more like a traditional classroom but that the schools it services cannot currently access the bandwidth this would require.

• Document ID: 19652 |
• Last modified: 6 February 2008, 10:48am