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Turning the Tide: E-Learning Signals Success for Inner-City and Rural Schools

By Howard C. Baker

The education sector is currently undergoing a technology-driven revolution. Digital storage and data mining, multimedia learning objects, the Internet, portals, and virtual communities are just some of the technologies that will form the future of teaching and learning in inner-city and rural areas of the U.S. And alliances bringing higher education together with high-tech organizations are helping to enable this transformation in learning.

For example, Marist College, a 75 year-old liberal arts institution (and home of the renowned Marist Institute for Public Opinion), has partnered with IBM for 17 years, and is a member of Big Blue’s Academic Initiative, a worldwide program that provides colleges and universities with a broad range of open standards hardware and software technologies, as well as course materials, training programs and other resources. Marist and IBM announced in May 2003 their plan to create a digital media infrastructure for online learning. The result, dubbed Project Greystone, is now being implemented, not only in Poughkeepsie, but in the neighboring Hudson Valley school districts of Highland, Millbrook, Newburgh and Walkill, as well as Lourdes High School in Poughkeepsie.

Project Greystone

Why Project Greystone? Inner-city and rural school districts are chronically under-funded and perpetually in need of high quality math and science teachers. Marist, IBM and Cisco shared the conviction that technological innovation, in the form of digital storage, data mining, multimedia learning objects, portals and virtual communities, could “challenge the differences,” in the words of Roger Norton, dean of the School of Computer Science and Math at Marist, between these districts and their more affluent counterparts.

The Project is taking advantage of technologies nurtured in IBM’s renowned Research Labs, both in nearby Hawthorne, New York, and in Boeblingen, Germany. These technologies, not yet commercially available, include:

• A rich content interface for creating, managing and distributing rich media applications and objects
• Enterprise Media Beans (EMBs) that provide an open standard media framework, regardless of underlying transport and rendering mechanisms.

What does all of this state-of-the-art technology deliver? Best-practice education modules for elementary science and mathematics, advanced placement, and college-level courses. Access to these courses can fundamentally change the college admissions outlook for deserving students in resource-strapped school districts. Project Greystone also includes graduate-level and certification courses for teachers. In addition, the project houses several important digital archives that are available to students. These include:

• An e-brary, a collection of more than 23,000 digitized books
• The Emmy Awards collection, the official archive of Emmy Awards broadcasts in sports, news and documentaries
• The FDR collection, part of the archives of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who lived in nearby Hyde Park, NY
• The Merit collection, downloadable course reserve material for Marist students
• On The River, a collection of over 130 PBS videos featuring the Hudson River

Project Greystone can have a far-reaching impact on the communities it serves. According to Dean Norton, “e-learning can function as the educational asset that makes these schools viable and holds small rural communities together instead of forcing families to move in order to provide educational opportunities for their children.” For teachers, e-learning can enable them to fulfill their requirements and advance their careers. The Department of Education deems literally thousands of school districts in the United States “Teacher Shortage Areas.” The Project Greystone online learning environment can help fill the teaching gap.

And let’s not forget cost effectiveness. Marist and IBM estimate that e-learning via Project Greystone may cost significantly less than classroom education. “This cost difference could be enough incentive to engage the interest of many school districts,” says Dean Norton.

Indeed, the ultimate goal of the partners is to make Project Greystone available as a service to K-12 schools across the country. Sounds like an A+ idea.

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Howard C. Baker is Development Project Manager with IBM Systems &Technology Group, Marist College Joint Studies

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