INFORMATION BYWAY

TALK OF THE BROADBAND ECONOMY

Imagine having to travel for more than an hour on rural two-lane roads traversing farmland, rivers and sounds to take a community college continuing education class. And, with only dial-up access available and high-speed coverage practically nonexistent, distance learning on the Net isn't an option. That's the everyday reality facing the four-county, 2000-square-mile region of rural eastern North Carolina served by the Beaufort County Community College district. So to help students connect, the college has delivered high-speed access to students via a mobile computer lab, the first of its kind in North Carolina.

“The inspiration for the mobile computer lab stems from the community college mission of making education affordable and accessible,” said Penny Sermons, BCCC's director of learning resources. “We live in a very remote area of eastern North Carolina that does not have the same type of Internet connectivity as more urban areas, and our goal was to push the technology and deliver the education to the citizens who might not be able to travel to the college.”

The mobile lab brings classes to students in a centralized location typically five or 10 minutes from their homes. The setup consists of a van with new Wi-Fi-equipped laptops, servers, networking equipment and rooftop satellite equipment. On arrival, the laptops are set up by staff members, and the van containing the satellite-supplied Internet connection is parked outside, up to 300 feet away from the building.

Dawn Pinkham, part-time mobile computer lab instructor for the program, says most of her students this semester are people in their late 50s to early 80s who simply don't want the information superhighway to pass them by. “Having this wireless technology is, I guess, opening people's eyes as to what can be found on the Internet and the things they can access,” she said.

Since the start of the project in August, 30 students have taken advantage of the program, which so far consists of eight continuing ed classes such as Introduction to Windows XP and Internet Basics. Sermons said the college is planning to use the mobile lab for curriculum classes next semester.

The lab was funded with a $265,000 grant from the Rural Internet Access Authority's e-NC Initiative, a grassroots effort to make Internet available and affordable to citizens in rural areas. “The community college budget is very tight in North Carolina, and this opportunity would never have happened had we not had grant funding,” Sermons said.

The program has been well received among students. “It's helped remove barriers to education for our citizens in this area,” she said. “We're anticipating there will be uses for it that we really haven't even thought of yet, because it's so flexible — it's mobile, it's like learning anywhere. In fact, ‘the sky's the limit’ is sort of our slogan.”