Impediments

It is clear from the preceding discussion that supply issues remain the most serious barrier to the adoption of broadband in the education sector. In consultations with NOIE, education providers emphasised that there is a great deal of latent demand for existing broadband applications. Education providers claim demand is being suppressed by price and availability issues. In addition, the absence of affordable broadband is hampering the development of applications. Other impediments to broadband takeup include bandwidth management issues, technical support problems, the need for professional development, cultural change concerns and digital rights management.

Infrastructure Issues

Despite a shift in recent debate to the demand side of broadband development, the supply side remains the most pressing issue for educational institutions. Many institutions still need access to quality, affordable broadband. In discussions with stakeholders, supply side concerns have been as dominant as issues of content, applications and curriculum. A recent report concluded "The provision of bandwidth to NSW schools is so poor that, rather than enhancing the learning of students there is reason to believe it may be wasting the time of and disengaging both students and teachers". A similar conclusion could equally apply to other states where bandwidth falls well short of demand.

In discussions with NOIE, educators frequently suggested that increased bandwidth would open many new educational opportunities for them. For example, schools could use interactive online applications to demonstrate experiments that are too dangerous to perform in the classroom. VET courses could do interactive master classes to teach skills such as welding to remote students. Higher education courses could include media-rich content, delivered to students in Asian countries.

To some extent, education sector consumers are likely to have an ever-increasing requirement for more bandwidth. However, without attention to the infrastructure side of broadband, the significant advances that broadband content and applications are making will not realise their full potential.

Availability

The backbone network, which links major Australian cities, is mainly a fibre optic cable network. The National Bandwidth Inquiry found that there is sufficient backbone capacity in and between major centres, particularly on the east coast. However, there are few spurs off the main backbone into regional areas and the 'last mile', the connection from the backbone (usually at a local exchange) to the premises, is expensive in both metropolitan and regional areas. Issues of availability are therefore not consistent throughout Australia. There are limitations in the fibre backbone in places such as regional Western Australia and there are other limitations in the availability of spurs for access to regional centres from the east coast backbone.

Affordablity

The demand for telecommunications services throughout the education and training sector is driven primarily by the integration of telecommunications and multimedia services in teaching and in the delivery of education services. A 2001 survey found Telstra to be the primary carrier used by the vast majority (80 per cent) of education and training providers in all areas and in all States and Territories.

Competition had helped improve services and reduce prices particularly in metropolitan areas and for institutions with larger enrolments. Nevertheless, the study found that most education and training providers incur considerable (relative to their size) expenditure on telecommunications services. In calendar year 2000, expenditure on telecommunications services among education and training providers ranged from less than $1,000 for a small community education organisation, to over $1.5 million for some larger universities.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that for many educational institutions the cost of broadband is such that paying for increased bandwidth would be at the expense of other core services. For example, for small schools to pay more for bandwidth, they would need to cut teaching staff and increase class sizes, which would offset the positive impact of a broadband connection. Larger institutions have a greater capacity to offset the opportunity cost of increased ICT spending. These factors imply that the education sector may be experiencing market failure in some areas. Educational institutions need a new business model for the pricing and supply of broadband services.

One such business model involves groups of institutions such as schools, hospitals or local governments banding together to control their own telecommunications infrastructure through either direct investment or leasing. Exploiting a 'condominium' or multi-tenant arrangement, the financial risk is shared across a number of optical fibre pairs within the one cable route linking various stakeholder offices and campuses. With appropriately dimensioned LANs, schools have gained access to bandwidths in the range of 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps. Audited payback periods of under four years have been achieved, compared to the conventional arrangement of purchasing bandwidth from carriers.

For educational institutions that already have access to broadband, the cost of data is a consideration that impacts substantially on usage. With a fast data transfer speed, data costs can become a substantial proportion of ICT budgets. Some institutions have addressed this problem by implementing a user pays approach to data consumption, but if economic constraints prevent students from downloading relevant information, this may skew the legitimate educational use of bandwidth intensive services. Some states are attempting to address problems of availability and affordability by aggregating demand across the schools sector or across state government. Reliability

Unless broadband connections are reliable, their utility to educators is limited. Many teaching staff do not have the technical skills needed to solve network problems. Some institutions, particularly schools, do not have on-call technical staff. Teaching staff may resist using broadband services if they experience technical difficulties.

Reliability and ease of use are essential if educators are to successfully integrate broadband services into learning. Available evidence suggests that schools with 64 or 128 kbps ISDN lines use their connections to provide additional information on subjects currently being studied, with student research becoming a central component of assessment. Students cannot complete units of work set by their teachers if the internet is not available when they need to complete their research tasks. Students may lose interest in the subject and teachers may be reluctant to include internet-based research in the curriculum.

Slow internet data transfer speeds also cause reliability problems. Slow download times may result in pages or servers timing out so that students cannot access the required information.

Technical Support

Many educational institutions lack the technical support they require to ensure a reliable broadband service. Educators often have limited technical experience and consequently they find it difficult to deal with technical problems as they occur. Teachers may not understand complex technical problems and are therefore unable to report network faults accurately. Poor fault reporting causes further inappropriate technical support and delays the resolution of problems. Staff at institutions that do not have good technical support cannot rely on the technology and this reduces the extent to which they can integrate broadband into their teaching activities.

Better equipped institutions employ full time technical support staff as part of their broadband strategies. This generally contributes to higher levels of ICT and internet usage. Technical support needs to be included and costed as part of any broadband strategy. The VicOne network in Victoria has addressed the requirement for technical support and allocates bandwidth and technical support in proportion to the number of students in the school.

Some VET organisations have identified the maintenance and support of broadband connections as a major risk to their online learning strategy. While funding is available for the initial set-up and implementation, VET institutions must fund ongoing costs from their annual budgets.

Bandwidth Management

Users can saturate even a large bandwidth capacity with high volume traffic of undifferentiated value. Educational institutions use strategies to deal with bandwidth management problems, including filters and systems that require users to pay for data.

Schools in South Australia have overcome bandwidth saturation problems by introducing filtering software that prohibits the download of particular file types, including MP3s. Schools that have introduced these software filters have seen their bandwidth capacity increase by up to 80 per cent.

Glen Waverley Secondary College (GWSC) uses a payment system that lets students download all file types including MP3 and AVI files, but students pay a per megabyte usage charge. This encourages students to use the internet resources of the school responsibly. GWSC's bandwidth management system recognises that the education sector has a legitimate use for music and multimedia. GWSC actively encourages students to download media rich files for inclusion in digital art and design classes, multimedia projects and music classes. In addition to advocating responsible use of internet resources, GWSC staggers its school day and is open for students to use the internet facilities until 6pm at night to spread network access over a greater number of hours.

Bandwidth management is a significant issue for all educational institutions. The market needs tools that optimise bandwidth management in large multi user sites such as schools, TAFEs and higher education. These tools would help these sites to make better use of their available broadband.

Security

The kinds of filters mentioned under the section Bandwidth Management are generally used to limit the downloading of file types which use excessive bandwidth. Filtering and security measures are also used in some states to rigorously protect students from pornography and violent content on the internet. Security is another issue which broadband users need to take account of, both implementing effective firewalls to protect their data but also limiting the kind of content which their users can access.

Professional Development

Many stakeholders have identified the need for staff development as a barrier to the integration of broadband technology into educational institutions. Teachers need adequate training, and time away from teaching face to face, to research and incorporate broadband material into their courses and realise the advantages online learning can afford.

The South Australian Technology School of the Future provides structured training in technology to teachers around the world. The Centre is the largest provider in Australia of hands-on teacher training in school use of computers. This kind of teacher training is essential if broadband applications are to be successfully integrated into courses. Teachers skilled at integrating learning objects into their courses can help their students reap the benefits of media-rich simulations and high quality digital content.

The successful integration of ICT and the internet into advanced schools such as Glen Waverley Secondary College (GWSC) and Essendon North Primary School (ENPS) has been underpinned by comprehensive professional development programs. GWSC runs professional development streams that cover topics including online learning, authoring web pages and using the intranet. Last year GWSC teachers completed 3,500 hours of in-house professional development with each teacher undertaking an average of 65 hours of professional development. In addition, each teacher attends three full days that focus on technology and learning. Similarly, all teachers at ENPS are involved professional development programs on a weekly basis. Some teachers learn additional technical skills so that they are able to provide ongoing support for their colleagues. There is an expectation at both GWSC and ENPS that teachers will comprehensively incorporate ICT and the internet into the school's curriculum.

The VET sector has also identified professional development as a key focus area and is investing on a national level in this area. Goal one of FLAG's "Strategy 2002" aims to train "Creative Capable People: To build a critical mass of VET staff who are able to use flexible learning approaches to accelerate Australia's transition to the information economy."

Cultural change

The question of cultural change is closely related to that of staff development. The use of the internet in the classroom and the move to flexible learning off-campus for VET and higher education students are significant changes and these have caused resistance amongst some teaching staff. Staff need support to understand these new technologies. They also require a broader context to understand how the changes caused by broadband fit in with wider developments in the education sector.

Digital Rights Management

The Department of Education, Science and Training recently published a report examining digital rights management in the higher education sector[53]. The study examines the capacity of educational institutions or networks to hold copies of documents in cache and looks at how the charging regime for print materials will translate into the digital world. Presently, institutions are not allowed to hold copies of documents in cache for legal reasons. This results in multiple downloads for useful documents, increasing data costs. Paying for digital information in addition to paying data costs might be a major restriction on broadband use for institutions once the regulatory regime for digital rights management has been finalised. Once the education sector overcomes broadband access problems, data cost and digital rights problems will become more important barriers to effective broadband use.