There aren't many telephones for teachers and staff at Barker College, a co-educational Anglican school with 2000 students spread across 36 buildings on a 40-acre campus in the northern Sydney suburb of Hornsby.
But that doesn't mean you can't reach them by phone. Dial a staff member at the school, and you're likely as not going to reach them over a voice over IP (VoIP) soft phone running on a notebook PC they've plugged into one of more than 2000 network points located around the campus. Leave a voicemail, and it's going to be transmitted to their notebooks as an email attachment.
The integration of VoIP at Barker is the latest in a string of network upgrades that stretches back to 1995, when the school installed a formal 10BaseT network in a hub-and-spoke configuration to replace its ageing LocalTalk network. It soon realised a switched architecture would provide more bandwidth, and by 1999 was installing Cisco Systems switches to upgrade key links to support gigabit ethernet.
Those switches supported VoIP out of the box, and by the time it became necessary to replace the school's ageing Alcatel PABX, it was clear that the technology could deliver some very real benefits. The replacement PABX, a Nortel Meridian 11C that was installed at the beginning of 2002, supported both the existing phone system and data-based VoIP connections terminated either at real desk phones or - in the majority of cases - soft phones running on the more than 250 notebooks rolled out to teachers, tutors, heads of house and the headmaster.
That's a big change for teachers who, as is the case at most schools, had grown used to sharing a single phone line between up to a dozen staff members. But it didn't happen overnight.
"Working within budgets and strategic frameworks, it's been a planned series of phased-in alterations over a number of years," says Peter Williamson, Manager of Information Services at the college. "Years ago we were thinking of VoIP because we'd issued our staff with laptops, and also because we were running out of telephone infrastructure - 10 pairs into the buildings wasn't enough. Rather than laying more telephone cable, we thought the existing network could be used to support that as well."
Through a series of network upgrades, Barker is now running a high-speed data network that stretches from 10 Mbps shared connections in little-used areas, to the switched 100 Mbps connections that link 60 per cent of the school's desktops, to the gigabit ethernet inter-server links that reduce bottlenecks in key parts of the network.
Having so much bandwidth has also enabled creation of a central video archive that lets teachers record and archive valuable programs that are delivered to classrooms as streaming video. The system supports more than a dozen simultaneous video streams and is enjoying increasing usage amongst the school's teaching staff.
Learning the business of IT
For many cash-strapped schools the length and breadth of Australia, the ever-elusive IT business case, combined with the need to stretch funding across an increasingly mind-numbing array of areas, has made it difficult to plan long-term IT network strategies with any degree of certainty.
State departments of education have been quick to farm out thousands of computers in dispatches that are part of politically savvy power plays. Yet those computers get old, and refreshing them is not always seen as a priority by politicians whose main concern is bolstering computer-to-student ratios against international benchmarks.
For years, network connectivity has been an equally unglamorous issue. Schools with increasing numbers of computers have been struggling to share 64 Kbps or 128 Kbps ISDN lines, and it's only recently, with recent network improvement projects in NSW, Victoria and Western Australia, that those connections have been increased to capacities more suitable for the large number of heavy users typical in secondary schools.
Indeed, the dynamics of scale produce an extremely difficult situation for colleges. Universities with tens of thousands of students - whose IT strategies more resemble those of large corporates than small to medium enterprises (SMEs) - enjoy fibre-optic links into national backbones, while colleges having 1000 to 2000 students typically lack the resources, know-how and political strength to significantly improve bandwidth or deliver new applications.
That's often left the deployment of new technology to IT-savvy teachers, whose knowledge of networking technologies is usually far from expert. That presented a real problem for the Sydney Distance Education High School (SDEHS), an institution whose 150 teachers and staff cater for a population of around 800 students.
In the past, SDEHS has run its correspondence-based courses manually, using brochures and relying on the good graces of the postal system to keep in touch with students. The transition to online learning is a natural one for such institutions, but when it came time to actually put such systems in place the going got a lot tougher. SDEHS had one network port per room, connected to 10 Mbps shared hubs that linked around 50 ancient computers throughout the school.
The result was an environment where IT was seen as a hindrance rather than a helper. The school's 64 Kbps Internet connection meant performance was horrendous, and teachers often had to queue to access student information systems, email, word processors for report writing and other applications.
"It was a really bad system," says Ian Tobitt, an SDEHS teacher who was given the role of computer co-ordinator. "If we were going to trial voice over the Internet, get teachers emailing properly and having communications with students using chatting, we really needed a computer on every desk."
A 2002 network upgrade, combined with the purchase of 40 new PCs, helped resolve the problem - technically, at least. That upgrade - which included the installation of Allied Telesyn gigabit ethernet switches, a Department of Education-backed upgrade of Internet bandwidth to 2 Mbps, and establishment of a student records system - improved the management of student data and has helped point SDEHS towards online learning that was simply impossible in the past.
"It's about providing better service for the students," Tobitt says.
A matter of scale
While that's a noble goal in anybody's eyes, it's one that can become horribly elusive as schools wrestle with ageing network infrastructures that hinder their take-up of new learning technologies. As SDEHS and Barker both found, keeping networks current is a major part of the push towards online learning.
Recognising that scale is a big issue for schools, NSW and Queensland have recently taken dramatic steps towards giving the schools a helping hand. Through contracts with Unisys and WebCentral, respectively, the states have applied some high-end know-how that's providing email and filtered web access for the entire student populations of these states.
The Queensland portal, which went live on June 30 after a three-month implementation that included migration of data on 560,000 students and staff from 1350 schools, is an exercise in applying corporate computing principles to the education community.
The system is based on 63 Sun Microsystems servers; uses around 4.5 TB of SAN-based storage to hold email, web pages, and other content; and runs on software such as the SunONE infrastructure and directory service. Hosted out of WebCentral's Brisbane-area data centre, it's been engineered to corporate standards with high availability and longevity as key design goals. Each student gets a customised portal interface and a lifelong email address that's been designed to follow students throughout every stage of their academic career.
It's the kind of technology that most schools could only dream about supplying on its own, but simple economics of scale mean is only possible through the intervention of education departments such as Education Queensland, which has committed $20.3 million to the project over the next five years.
Doing more with less
Does that mean there's little hope for schools wanting to give their students and teachers the benefit of the latest technologies and learning content? Maybe. But that doesn't mean schools should give up entirely; rather, careful prioritising can often reveal areas that improve efficiency - and provide significant improvements down the road.
Such was the case at Melbourne's Essendon Keilor College (EKC), which has completely reworked its data and voice networks as it catches up with the effects of a 1992 amalgamation that combined five schools into three. EKC now serves around 1900 students all told, and has worked with integrator NetStar to extend its LAN across a network of wireless transmission towers.
While these towers improved LAN connectivity between geographically dispersed school sites, it had done little to improve communication within the institution. Each school was on a separate phone number, meaning that even internal calls had to be routed across the public phone network and redirected by a receptionist at each campus. This made for a high-cost, low-efficiency phone system.
When EKC's PABX began showing signs of age, the school looked into replacements and ended up in discussions with Nortel Networks, which worked with NetStar to design and install a VoIP solution that would migrate the school's voice communications onto its established data network.
Managed using Nortel's Business Communication Manager software, the converged network has improved communications, provided voicemail for the first time and - through efficiency improvements in the handling of calls - saved considerable amounts of money that have instead gone towards other projects. For example, EKC has been working on building up its intranet, which has been made accessible to parents, teachers and other stakeholders from anywhere via the Internet.
As with any IT investment, the impact of the changes technology introduces to schools will only become clear over time. However, experience has shown that network upgrades can provide both efficiency and cost savings for schools struggling to explore ways in which online technologies can improve learning outcomes. Will it make for better students? Hopefully. But in the short term, the benefits of better school networks simply cannot be ignored.
