Opinion: Broadband critical to distance education in rural America
By GREGORY POWELL, Published March 30, 2007
When people ask me as a college president what they can do to support education, I surprise them with four short words: “Help us get broadband.”

Don’t misunderstand me. Broadband is just part of what we need. Like any college president, I would like our students to have a larger library, a wider selection of course offerings, distinguished visiting scholars to complement an outstanding permanent faculty and beautiful physical facilities.
However, for a community college in rural Texas (or anywhere in rural America), one of the greatest immediate benefits for our students would be the ability to have the high-speed Internet connection known as broadband in their own homes.

Along with 14 other colleges and universities in Northeast Texas, my college, Panola College, uses the Internet and interactive TV to provide distance learning to students who can’t attend classes on a campus but want to earn a college degree or enhance their professional background with technical or continuing education courses. This collaborative program, which reaches 50 counties comprising 46 percent of the state’s rural population, is called the Northeast Texas Distance Learning Consortium (NETnet.org). It enables students in rural Texas to stay at home to keep the family farm or business alive while also getting an education.

Panola College’s online offerings include 105 courses and three degrees in areas such as business, registered nursing and teacher education. We provide instruction to firefighters, police, first responders and folks on different work schedules. We also offer dual credit, early admission courses in English, history, math and biology for rural high school students who can’t travel to a college campus.

As a measure of our success, Panola’s enrollment in online courses has jumped from approximately 300 to more than 3,000 students in the past six years. In addition, through NETnet, students can earn bachelor’s and graduate degrees.

But as good as our distance learning program is, many students get much less than they could if they had at-home hook ups to broadband—the always online connection necessary for streaming video; to replay a missed lecture; to participate in online discussion with classmates and professors; and to readily download large studies, academic reports and other information materials that are standard fodder in the typical college course.

With broadband at home (as it is for any city resident who wants it), such educational tools are available whenever the student wants. With broadband, a student is not confined to time or place and can do schoolwork for as long as he or she wants at a time of their choosing. This flexibility is especially important for students like ours who often work varying shift hours at full-time jobs or live by the natural rhythm of a farm or ranch.

However, for most of our students, broadband at home simply is not an option—either the wires do not run to their community, or the service is so expensive they cannot afford it. The way distance learning works now, students must drive to locations where they can get access to high speed Internet.

At home, most of them rely on dial-up connections that tie up the family phone line whenever somebody connects to the Internet, is restricted to one user per line (a special problem in a multi-student household solved by broadband), can take hours to download a large file and cannot handle streaming video at all. Sometimes, an incoming call or other glitch knocks the connection offline—in the middle of a download, a lecture or an online discussion. It is as if we have given our students a very good bicycle but are asking them to compete in a world where everybody else owns a sports car.

America is supposed to be a land of equal opportunity, but, in the 21st century, that is not true when some students have access to broadband and some do not. If anybody thinks otherwise, they should visit us at Panola College to see how much more we could deliver if our students had home access to broadband.

Powell is president of Panola College (Texas), which specializes in distance learning as part of the Northeast Texas Distance Learning Consortium.