A year ago, access to an high-speed broadband connection still seemed to be a distant pipe dream for many New Zealand schools, but as we head into 2010, a new dawn of super-connectivity is on the horizon for education in New Zealand. Louis van Wyk examines what this will mean for the education sector.

Faster broadband cannot come soon enough for most of the country’s schools. Currently, only around 120 schools across New Zealand enjoy a fibre connection, according to the Ministry of Education.

Of these, 45 are centred on Auckland’s North Shore – connected to NEAL, the North Shore Education and Access Loop, a 1Gbps fibre optic network operated by VectorFibre, but built with funding from the previous government’s Broadband Challenge.

Over 20 schools are also currently connected to the National Education Network, a dedicated high-speed network for schools which REANNZ has trialled since mid-2008.

At the other end of the spectrum, fewer than a dozen schools still languish on dialup internet, while around 50 of the most remote schools have satellite connections, such as the three schools on the Chatham Islands.

This leaves the vast majority of schools still reliant on DSL connections. And while some boast racy ADSL2+ services, others suffer along on rudimentary 256kbps connections.

Even some larger high schools are struggling to get faster access, says Douglas Harré, senior ICT consultant at the Ministry of Education’s eLearning Unit. “One school with 2000 students has a 2Mbps DSL connection, while one of the teachers has an 8Mbps ADSL2+ connection at home for his family of five.”

Although most schools have been saved from dialup hell, for broadband to truly transform the delivery of education, ultrafast connectivity is crucial for schools to meet the demands of the 21st century, argues Charles Newton, a long-time educator and one of the protagonists behind the Loop Learning Network, which connects 29 schools in the Marlborough region.

“Unrestrained fast access has amazing potential in terms of learning, by allowing participation, collaboration and seamless interaction with anyone, anywhere else in world,” says Newton.

“The world is increasingly based on making connections, participating and collaborating. If you do not have fast internet access, you are limited in your potential to participate in the Web 2.0 world.”

The Loop Learning Network, commonly known as the Nelson Loop, aims to provide schools with effective and affordable two-click access to the world, says Newton. Schools use the network to connect not only to the outside world, but also with each other in order to share teaching resources. Often it is the students themselves who do the teaching, as in the case of one set of students who taught Maori songs to their counterparts from another school over a video link.

For Harré, high-speed broadband will offer schools a new range of ways to integrate ICT into the teaching approach, increase student engagement and provide new ways of supporting teachers in the classroom. “The use of digital tools in the classroom is increasingly dependent on access to broadband, so the lack of it limits the availability of digital content and services to schools.”

It will also address the issue of equity, says Harré. “Children in rural or remote areas expect that they will have access to the same content and services as their urban peers. As rich media content becomes increasingly pervasive, services like on-demand TV struggle to work well in a low-speed environment.”

Slow internet also makes it difficult for schools to equip students for the workforce, which increasingly requires people to be digitally literate with strong information management skills, while rural schools may struggle to attract top quality ICT-savvy candidates without the connectivity that is taken for granted in the city, says Harré.

Although high-speed broadband in schools will enable services such as high-definition videoconferencing and sharing teaching resources remotely, Harré finds many schools with such connections are still in ‘download mode’ with traffic flowing in one direction. “Generally there has been an explosion in the use of Web 2.0 applications in schools, such as Google Apps, Google Earth and YouTube.”

Into the cloud

However, the greatest benefit that fibre to schools can deliver may not be in classroom, but instead in the server room – or by eliminating the need for a server room, to be more precise.

With fibre, schools will be better able to take advantage of hosted ICT services or cloud applications, such as virtualised servers, off-site backup, hosted email and centralised administrative systems, explains Harré.

“Given that over 75% of New Zealand’s schools have less than 325 students it will mean that schools may, at last, be able to spend less time on looking after increasingly complex systems within schools.”

Charles Newton agrees that one of greatest benefits of high-speed broadband is that schools can lease ICT instead of buying it, adding that managing ICT systems is simply becoming “too hard” for most schools.

This is an issue that has been developing over the past 20 years, since the introduction of the Tomorrow’s Schools policy in 1989, explains Newton. Under this policy, schools became regarded as self-managed entities, and have been left to manage their own ICT systems. But with technological advances this has become an increasingly difficult task for many schools, resulting in the poor state of ICT infrastructure and capacity in schools today.

It makes more sense for ICT services to be centralised through a combination of regional and national strategies, Newton argues. “We should be doing much more centrally – many schools want this. They just want it working at the desktop.”

While the Ministry of Education has already begun centralising some ICT procurement, such as software licensing, more can be done, says Newton. “The Ministry has started to realise what has happened in terms of schools infrastructure. There has been a significant change in the way it is thinking about how to help with ICT support in future.”

Harré acknowledges that centralising ICT services would make sense for many schools, but concedes that the Ministry of Education is constrained by current government policy in its ability to provide such services. “There is tension between the legislative framework we work in and the financial benefit of centralised procurement and provision.”

He agrees that since ICT provision is all about scale, standardisation and providing services from the core, aggregating demand from schools could result in cost savings and improved service. “For instance, combined, schools spend around $10 million a year on internet access. If we took that $10 million and aggregated it, we would get a bigger and better deal for all schools.”

But Harré adds it is not necessarily the Ministry’s job to provide centralised ICT services to schools, saying he expects that as fast connectivity reaches more schools, service providers will emerge with offerings that will meet the new ICT demands of connected schools.

In the meantime, Telecom’s major offering for the education market is still the DSL-centric SchoolZone, launched in 2005. SchoolZone is a bundled service, reportedly provided to over 1000 schools, and includes internet access, videoconferencing, email and a host of other services into one package for a flat monthly rate.

According to Telecom, SchoolZone offers speeds ranging from 256kbps, 512kbps, 2Mbps to full speed up and down on ADSL, but while stating that fibre speeds are also available, Telecom is unwilling to reveal how many schools subscribe to SchoolZone on fibre, saying this is commercially sensitive.

However, considering that the majority of the country’s fibre-connected schools run on alternative fibre networks, such as NEAL or the Nelson Loop, it is unlikely that a significant number of schools access SchoolZone over fibre, especially since most SchoolZone services are available only on Telecom’s network.

A Telecom spokesperson says that only some of SchoolZone’s value added services, such as learning and management applications, can be accessed via other networks.

Nevertheless, high-speed broadband will reach many schools much faster than they could have imagined just a year ago. This includes a further 200 schools that will be connected to the National Education Network this year, while VectorFibre plans to connect another 227 schools over the next three years.

“Our aim is to connect every school in Auckland to fibre – Government funding dependent – within seven years, three years faster than the Government’s target,” says spokesperson Philippa White.

But will schools be ready to make the best of the fibre that will soon run to their doorstep?

Douglas Harré concedes that a steep learning curve lies ahead, adding that until the government’s high-speed and rural broadband initiatives were announced, fast broadband was a distant hope for most schools.

Harré says it is hard for many schools to imagine what they can do with fast connectivity, but argues that this will begin to change, albeit slowly, once fibre reaches more schools.

“It is not just a case of deploying fibre and everyone using it the next day. It will take time for schools to figure out how to use it. There are lots of competing demands on schools. Some will take to it with great gusto, while others will want to see what they can do with it.”

Charles Newton agrees that explaining what high-speed broadband can offer to someone who has only ever experienced dialup is a hard task. “They don’t have the comprehension of what fibre can do. There is still low understanding of its potential. No one is talking to schools yet – there is definitely a disjoint between what is coming and what schools know.”

The champions

One school that is leading the way in how it has harnessed high-speed broadband is Kristin School on Auckland’s North Shore. The school, with a roll of over 1700 students, is connected to NEAL and the National Education Network.

Kristin is renowned for its progressive approach to education, and its leading edge ICT environment is regarded as one of its main points of difference. Being connected to fibre has enabled the school’s teachers to deliver lessons when they’re needed, and to upload and download information fast and to a known budget.

The connection is also essential for Kristin to support the screeds of information it sends offshore for marking, as part of the International Baccalaureate education programme to which it subscribes, and allows it to download data-intensive education materials.

The school also runs security, phone and high-quality videoconferencing connections over fibre. But even fibre-connected schools are not yet making full use of this access.