Of the many educational applications and benefits foreseen, communication among people is the prime benefit of networking for education as colleagues, teachers, students, and parents gain access to a level of communication not possible before.
The need for professional development in network applications and resources includes both the classroom instructor as well as the building-level administrator who will adopt the new technology. Part of the problem is a lack of involvement on the part of teacher education programs and institutions. Colleges of education have tended to have limited network access.
Networking of any kind has been difficult to launch in education because of a lack of basic physical infrastructure … It should be possible to organize procurement to achieve economies. More efficient procurement can better leverage resources
Cost is a key reason that data networking connectivity among the educational community has basically only trickled down from the major research universities to other four-year schools and then to the two-year schools, with the K-12 and public library communities bringing up the rear … To bring the Internet to all these sites will be a major challenge.
The limited extension of the intracampus telecommunication infrastructure into classrooms and faculty offices, the shortage of desktop computers, the lack of resources for faculty development, and the scarcity of technical staff support have been major obstacles in programs mounted to date. Without extensive stimulation at state or federal levels, it may be more than several years before there will be ubiquitous access at institutions not already connected to the Internet.
The “electronic outreach” capability provided by the NII can enhance the recruitment and retention efforts of all educational institutions.
The NII will … help educational institutions to reach students where they are or prefer to be located. Students, especially graduate students, will want to pursue degree programs and professional development courses at teleconferencing sites that are convenient for them. For many students, especially older or adult students, convenient teleconferencing and remote access, in combination with the quality of their courses, may become more important than many of the campus experiences that accompany the traditional attending of classes at the institution itself.
Higher education is positioned to make extensive use of the NII to enhance the delivery of academic programs and to enrich their content by broadening the mix of inputs and participants.
One possibility is that high-performance computing in the future will involve networking dozens to thousands of workstations and other computers in different locations. Initially these computers will be running applications in the background and at night; but at some future time, people may collaborate through relatively continuous collaborative computing.
The increase in capabilities will make possible an overall shift from electronic-mail exchange and modest file-transfer activities to online distribution of large volumes of data (both measured and modeled), fueling in turn continued rapid growth in scientific researchers’ demands for network services.