Executive Summary

BACKGROUND

A fundamental transition is taking place in which the world is moving from an industrial to an information society, and information is evolving as a most critical factor for work and life in the twenty-first century. As a result, the ability to search, find, manipulate and present information is quickly becoming a required skill for all jobs. It is imperative, therefore, that Rhode Island's public system of higher education (1) move deliberately to provide students, faculty and staff with improved access to information technologies. This access is essential to advancing the principal missions of the system -- education, research, and public service -- so as to serve students better and to enhance further contributions to the state's economic development.

Having identified telecommunications (2) as an area essential for remaining competitive in higher education and indispensable for bolstering the economic prosperity of the state, the Rhode Island Board of Governors for Higher Education decided to take an in-depth look at this issue across the system. Because the Board wanted an informed opinion on the feasibility and options for future directions, an External Committee on Telecommunications and Higher Education was established. This committee, composed of 14 members and their alternates, was charged with addressing the issues related to the role of higher education in the state s telecommunications infrastructure and formulating a set of recommendations for consideration by the Board of Governors.

The committee began its work in the summer of 1994, held 10 meetings (including ones at each of the three public institutions of higher education), and worked diligently to explore alternatives and to reach consensus on what to propose. From its deliberations, the committee identified a series of findings, a group of goals, and a set of recommendations for the Board of Governors for Higher Education.

FINDINGS

After analyzing the information supplied by the three public institutions of higher education (the University of Rhode Island, Rhode Island College, and the Community College of Rhode Island) and the Rhode Island Office of Higher Education, and information available on other institutions of higher education, the committee reached the following conclusions relative to the status of telecommunications in the public higher education system in Rhode Island.

FINDINGS:

The Rhode Island public system of higher education is woefully ill-equipped and under-funded to meet the telecommunications and computer networking needs of its students, faculty and staff, and the public.
Much of the telecommunications equipment in the public system of higher education, such as telephone systems, computer networks, and microcomputers/workstations, is largely out-of-date and inadequate for supporting emerging forms of information technology.
The current standard data networking technology is Ethernet; both RIC and CCRI are primarily using older technologies which run at much slower speeds. However, all the fiber networks in place at RIC and CCRI can facilitate Ethernet.
The fiber network backbone at URI extends to just 25 percent of the buildings, whereas most of RIC and all of CCRI is interconnected to a network.
The telephone systems at URI and RIC are among the greatest problems confronting information technology and infrastructure at the public institutions. Currently, the phone switches at URI and RIC do not support the North American Dialing Plan Standards. The existing switches cannot accommodate additional phone lines, and the cabling is in relatively poor condition.
The public institutions of higher education are not equipped to supply information across campuses because the network infrastructures for voice and data are inadequate and do not extend to all areas of all campuses.
In addition to having an insufficient number of workstations, the public institutions of higher education have network infrastructures that can be characterized as patchwork technologies that are, in some cases, more than 10 years old.
Although all three public institutions of higher education are studying how to improve their telecommunications and computer networks capabilities, little or no thought to date has been given to establishing compatible infrastructures and applications for the entire public system of higher education.
Higher education even lags behind elementary and secondary education in terms of the number of personal computers. Recent national estimates show that the ratio of students to computers is about 14 to 1 in grades K through 12, whereas the ratio in public higher education is about 24 to 1.
The libraries at the public institutions of higher education, through the HELIN system, provide the best example of cooperation and coordination of delivery systems within the higher education system.
All three public institutions of higher education currently spend on telecommunications and computer networking, as part of their annual institutional budgets, an amount less than the national mean percentages for similar institutions.

GOALS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

Based upon these findings, the committee developed a series of long-range goals, which are summarized below.

1. An Information Society. Rhode Island's public colleges and university must move quickly to provide faculty, staff and students with access to telecommunications technologies if they are to remain competitive with their peers and are to be prepared for the twenty-first century.

2. Campus Information Infrastructure. Each institution needs a campus-wide information infrastructure that will make information available universally within its institutional community.

3. Financial Support. Strategies must be developed to provide the public institutions of higher education with the resources necessary to acquire, modernize and support telecommunications and computer networks.

4. Access to Information. Information, both within the institution and outside in the world at large, must be available to people when they need it, in a form that is understandable and useable to them.

5. Institutional Interconnection. Priority should be given to interconnecting the systems of CCRI, RIC, URI, and RIOHE. A fully compatible, online information system should be developed that could be used by all three institutions and the agency.

6. Libraries. The spirit of cooperation among the libraries of both public and private institutions in the state is remarkable. Libraries should be further strengthened and supported so they can continue to fulfill their roles in public higher education.

7. Teacher Training. Capacity-building efforts for teachers should extend to both those in the classroom today as well as teachers in training, so that they can take full advantage of the opportunities that technology provides.

8. Long-Range Planning. Information technology cannot simply be integrated into an institution s long-range planning -- it affords opportunities to rethink core assumptions and strategies.

9. Public Responsibility. In developing the communications infrastructure, the institutions must position themselves to be able to participate fully in any statewide telecommunications efforts that may be developed.

The goals led to the development of a set of specific recommendations. These recommendations are divided into two types: those for Board of Governors action and those the Board of Governors should ask the institutions to implement.

The External Committee on Telecommunications and Higher Education recommends that the Rhode Island Board of Governors for Higher Education adopt these recommendations and take the necessary steps to see that they are implemented.

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