ACCESS INDIANA Connects:

Simplifying Internet and Distance Video Technologies for Indiana's Schools

ACCESS INDIANA, perhaps, by now, you've heard of it. But what is it, and why is it important to Indiana schools?

ACCESS INDIANA was initiated in July 1994 as a partnership between the Governor's Office and the Indiana Department of Education for the purpose of promoting equitable Internet access to all Indiana public schools, libraries and governmental institutions. Since that time ACCESS INDIANA has evolved to keep pace with the rapid changes in technology, and it has extended its partnership to include the Indiana State Library, the Indiana Higher Education Telecommunication System (IHETS) and the Intelenet Commission. Between them, these institutions share a common focus and resolve to maximize for Indiana the opportunities inherent in today's telecommunications technologies.

ACCESS INDIANA is about content and infrastructure. It is about delivering to schools the content that heretofore has been inaccessible to, or too costly for, our schools, and it is about the development of a state infrastructure of the wires, cables and electronics required to bring this content into our classrooms.

What Content?

Content gives infrastructure its value. Unless the wires, cables and electronics can deliver quality information resources, the technology alone has no value. Therefore, in addition to the technology itself, ACCESS INDIANA has focused on four areas of content that are critical to all Hoosiers, and especially to our schools:

1. The ACCESS INDIANA Information Network (AIIN).
2. INdiana SPectrum of Information Resources: INSPIRE, Indiana's virtual library on the Internet.
3. The Indiana Digital County Network (INDICO) and 28 different Indiana Community Networks.
4. The ACCESS INDIANA Teaching & Learning Center.

Collectively these resources represent a commitment on behalf of Indiana's government to offer the highest quality state, local and global content available.

The ACCESS INDIANA Information Network:

The purpose of the ACCESS INDIANA Information Network (AIIN) is to provide a an on-line public access gateway to state information. What does this mean? As we all know, state government holds a lot of information, but finding that information, and actually getting a copy of it can be a trying experience, even for the most patient among us. In fact, so much content is maintained by the state that even the officials who are suppose to manage it sometimes don't know where it is or how to find it. Thus it has been the charge of ACCESS INDIANA to use technology to provide a coherence to the vastness of state information. In response, the ACCESS INDIANA Information Network offers a simple one-stop-shopping on-line gateway that immeasurably improves the public's ability to get to the state's information on demand, and the ease and efficiency with which users can access public information via the AIIN is unrivaled by any other governmental website on the Internet. As a matter of fact, the AIIN is so successful that approximately 1.5 million users per month are taking advantage of its gateway to access content placed on-line by the Indiana General Assembly, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, the State Archives, the Department of Natural Resources, the Secretary of State, the Indiana Election Commission, the State Fair, the Governor's Office, and literally dozens of other state offices and agencies. Rather than collecting dust in a remote Indianapolis office, this is content that is now accessible 24 hours per day, every day of the year.

INSPIRE:

The INdiana SPectrum of Information Resources, INSPIRE, is Indiana's virtual library on the Internet, and, as such, it provides on-line home and classroom access to many resources that heretofore could only be found at the local library. In addition, INSPIRE offers a huge cost savings to local libraries. Instead of each Indiana library having to pay hefty subscription fees for these same services, the Indiana State Library has negotiated a single statewide contract for these services, thus providing wider more equitable access across the state at a significant savings of local tax dollars.

The Indiana Digital County Network (INDICO) and Indiana Community Networks:

Of course, not all useful content resides at the state or global levels. In fact, much of what is important to most of us is the information that can be found only within our own communities. From 1994-96, ACCESS INDIANA grant funds were made available to Indiana communities to develop

community networks which would serve as on-line gateways to their own local content. This effort resulted in the development of 28 community networks serving 540 Indiana cities and towns from Elkhart to Evansville. In addition, to supplement those areas of the state where community networks were not developed, ACCESS INDIANA has created The Indiana Digital County Network (INDICO), which provides a common content base (commerce, education, government, health, leisure, news, etc.) for all of Indiana's 92 counties. When they are ready, local community leaders will be encouraged to develop this information and the INDICO resources themselves, and create their own on-line community gateways.

The ACCESS INDIANA Teaching & Learning Center:

The final piece of the ACCESS INDIANA content projects is the ACCESS INDIANA Teaching & Learning Center (the AITLC), which is being developed to provide a single K-12 gateway to on-line content of the highest instructional quality. It is a unique resource, and it is already receiving high praise from Indiana's educators.

To understand why the AITLC is needed, query one of the commercial Internet search engines for references to Theodore Roosevelt, and you may get 100,000 or more references. This far more information than a student or teacher can be expected to effectively process. Enter a search query for The Bull Moose Party, and your first reference may be a BYOB college site "where the party never ends". The Internet provides a plethora of outstanding educational resources, but finding and grouping them requires some expertise and considerable time. To address this problem the AITLC

provides a gateway to educational topic guides that have been specifically developed for K-12 teachers and students. U.S. Presidents, authors, artists, museums, libraries, countries, cultures and governments are but a few of the topic guides available, plus specialized curricular guides such as geography, algebra, chemistry and Indiana history are all made available through the AITLC for free and public access.

The AITLC is a joint production of the Indiana Department of Education, ACCESS INDIANA, the Indiana State Teachers' Association and the University of Indianapolis, and its content comes directly from references and recommendations submitted by Indiana educators. Under development since November of 1997, the AITLC will be fully activated for the 1998-99 school year.

As is evident from the four initiatives described above, content is the muscle of ACCESS INDIANA, but infrastructure provides the skeletal framework that must be present if the muscle is to function and be productive. Providing access to literally the greatest content in the world is of little value if it cannot be delivered effectively, efficiently and affordably to Indiana's schools and classrooms, and this is where the ACCESS INDIANA State Backbone (AISB) plays such a vital role.

The ACCESS INDIANA State Backbone:

When ACCESS INDIANA was initiated in 1994, it was announced as a public-private partnership, with the intention that the state's content and usage commitments would stimulate private-sector investment in the infrastructure needed to support Indiana's on-line traffic. To a great extent, this has proven to be the case; but, unlike the closely regulated telephone industry, commercial data and video providers remain largely unregulated, and the resulting operational environment is akin to that of the great American wild west. It is truly capitalism at its rawest, with the winners feasting daily on the spoils of the losers, leaving customers with almost no rules or standards by which they can reasonably assess costs and quality of service.

Since 1994, dozens of independent Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have emerged across the state, with each struggling to keep revenues ahead of developmental costs. In addition, the multi-regional multi-national telecommunications conglomerates are in such heated competition that true cooperation for the common good is all but out of the question. It is a wonderful supply-and-demand consumer-driven market, but it is certainly a market in which the buyer must also beware.

For example, the technologies within the telecommunications industry are evolving so rapidly that often consumers are unfortunately purchasing services from a position of almost total ignorance. Customers only know what their vendors tell them, thus leaving them with little or no assurance that the telecommunications services they are purchasing are in fact the services they need at the best price and performance available in their market. Also, vendors unable to keep up with the demand often fail to meet their installation commitments, forcing customers (including schools, libraries and government offices) too often must wait many weeks or months longer than anticipated before their services arrive.

In addition, schools are particularly easy prey for revenue-driven marketeers who consistently sell schools more service than they need, or promise better service then they actually deliver. For example, electrical service is metered, and you pay for what you use. With dedicated Internet service, however, you pay for an entire pipeline of access whether you use it or not. Many, if not most, consumers, schools included, often are paying for a 4-lane highway worth of capacity, when their demand may be more on the scale of a country road.

This occurs, because vendors understand that it may be a long while before large customers, such as schools, will generate the traffic necessary to fill the pipes for they have paid, freeing the vendors to use the excess capacity of the pipe for multiple customers. Often times vendors will use the school as the incentive to install and pay for the pipe, and then will make their profits by using the same pipe to carry traffic generated by smaller surrounding private and commercial customers. The educators, meanwhile, thinking that they have purchased capacity that is dedicated to their school, become accustomed over time to a service quality that is significantly less than the service they should be receiving, if, in fact, they were being delivered the service for which they have paid.

The result is that the vendor may over-subscribe a schools purchased service by up to 20 times. Only the most astute and technologically savvy school customer will ever suspect they are being ripped off, and even they probably won't have a concern until the quality of their service becomes intolerably slow. If you were purchasing electrical service this way, you'd become concerned when you started experiencing brown-outs or black-outs, but, what if you had never had electrical service before and you thought brown-outs and black-outs were normal? Would you complain? Probably not, and so it is

with many schools purchasing commercial Internet service. They grow up, so to speak, with poor quality service, but they don't realize how bad it is because they have never experienced the quality of service they should expect.

To address this problem, ACCESS INDIANA has called upon the considerable resources of the Indiana Higher Education Telecommunication System and the Intelenet Commission to construct a state telecommunications backbone that will extricate educators, library boards and public officials from the Internet service shell game.

The ACCESS INDIANA State Backbone (AISB) will ensure the most effective, efficient, affordable and highest-quality data and video service possible for Indiana's schools, libraries and governmental institutions, with the intent of offering telecommunications services in which these agencies can make an investment with the confidence that the provider is looking out for their best interest.

As can be seen from the map, the AISB is to be deployed to most of the major urban centers throughout the state, and much like the Interstate highway system, the backbone will serve as the major public-sector Internet artery through Indiana. Each school, library and governmental institution will need only to purchase local service from a state-qualified provider to go the last mile, and tie themselves into the state's backbone. At present the deployment of this backbone is well underway, orders are being accepted, and connections are being made.

Interactive Distance Video On Demand:

The end game for ACCESS INDIANA is the transportation of interactive video on demand across the AISB. Interactive distance video on demand has tremendous educational and commercial potential, and the AISB is being constructed so that the schools, libraries and state institutions which attach to the state backbone will have the quality of service needed to make full use of this technology for educational programs, training sessions, professional meetings, etc.

The potential educational benefit of interactive distance video on demand has long been obvious. For example, it often is impossible for a small school to find a fully qualified physics teacher, when there are not enough physics students in the school to employ that teacher full-time. There also are unique interactive educational opportunities which can be made available to schools via universities, libraries, museums and industry. In short, the delivery of high quality interactive video on demand can allow educators across the state to share high-quality resources, and to take advantage of special educational opportunities that otherwise would be unavailable.

In addition to the quality Internet service described earlier, the AISB will also provide the infrastructure needed for Indiana schools to make interactive video on demand a reality in their classrooms. Additionally, there is an almost unending litany of library and governmental applications for interactive distance video on demand that will also make critical use of the AISB. State meetings which presently require participants to collectively travel thousands of miles, professional development seminars, business meetings, and adjudication proceedings are but a few of the myriad of applications which can benefit from local access to interactive distance video on demand, and, in doing so, can return significant savings in avoided travel and lost time at work.

Contact ACCESS INDIANA First:

The AISB and other services of ACCESS INDIANA are being developed for you and your schools. Before you purchase or renew Internet or distance video services, contact ACCESS INDIANA first. You will be given a fair unbiased assessment of your needs, you will save money, and you will be ensuring that you receive the quality of service for which you are being charged.