Distance Ed Consortium Gets $4 Million Grant for ‘Distance Divide' Research

LINCOLN, Neb. -- A distance education consortium headquartered at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln will lead a $4 million project to develop and deploy advanced Internet services and technologies over satellite to help close the "digital divide" that separates rural and low-income Americans from their urban and higher-income counterparts.

     The National Science Foundation is funding a three-year grant of nearly $4.04 million for the Advanced Internet Satellite Extension Project.

     The American Distance Education Consortium, based at UNL, will lead the research and development project, which will seek wireless Internet solutions to better serve rural and remote learning centers, businesses and offices. It also will focus on improving Internet delivery to tribal colleges, historically black colleges and universities and Hispanic-serving institutions.

     Janet Poley, president of ADEC, will lead the project with UNL's Dale Finkelson, an Information Services network engineer, and Dan Cotton, director of the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources' Communications and Information Technology unit, and the University of Maryland-College Park's Don Riley, chief information officer, and Valorie McAlpin, associate dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. ADEC will hire a project director and other staff to implement this program.

     Other participating institutions are the University of California, North Carolina State University, North Carolina A&T University, the University of Illinois and Washington State University.

     ADEC will partner with the Tachyon Corp. of San Diego, Calif., a global wireless Internet provider that carries network traffic via satellite between Tachyon Access Points (TAPs) and end-user premises and a Tachyon Satellite Gateway in San Diego.

     Among the questions to be addressed by the project:
     -- how to deliver Internet services without land lines at a reasonable cost to rural and underserved learning communities;
     -- whether the TAP technology will work to deliver these services; and
     -- how best to assure that networking and learning applications developed within Internet 2 can be available to rural learning centers and colleges and universities that are not part of the Internet 2 implementation.

     The project will include traffic characterization and measurement. The future use of the Internet for research and education will involve more interactive and collaborative applications. There are key questions about traffic flows between sites, frequency, duration and quality of the service delivery.

     The issues involved in this project sometimes are referred to as the "digital divide".

     ADEC is particularly interested in how well this type of system can be developed and used for distance education. Future learning applications will need to advance beyond electronic mail, web and other services. Voice and video as well as document sharing and display are important to some education programs.

     The project also will examine the effectiveness of learning using various media attributes. High bandwidth applications like those being deployed under Internet 2, offer realism to the learning environment. Increased bandwidth has the potential to improve learning through symbols and visuals and increase two-way communication, active engagement and rapid adaptation to learners.

     Learning more about the possibilities for use of satellites in delivering rich Internet-based education applications also is critical for global expansion of the Internet. ADEC recently cooperated with the Midwest International Agricultural Consortium (MIAC) and Tachyon to demonstrate and test this system in Mexico City. Leaders from Mexico and Latin America who attended were very interested in the potential to deliver more courses and programs in the Western Hemisphere through satellite and radio wireless technologies.

     ADEC is a consortium of 58 state universities and land grant colleges. In addition to the core institutions identified, ADEC expects that many of its member institutions will become involved in the project. A council including representatives from the historically black colleges, the tribal colleges and Hispanic-serving institutions will be established shortly. Also a "blue ribbon" panel of well-known experts in teaching and learning methods will be established.

CONTACTS:
      Janet Poley, president, American Distance Education Consortium, (402)472-7000
      Daniel R. Moser, coordinator of news and publishing, University of Nebraska Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources, (402)472-3030