SERVICES FOR EDUCATION IN THE METROPOLITAN

RESEARCH AND EDUCATION NETWORK

Miroslaw Czyrnek, Filip Koczorowski, Michal Kosiedowski, Cezary Mazurek, Piotr Pawalowski

Wojciech Pieklik, Maciej Stroinski, Jan Weglarz and Marcin Werla

Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center, ul. Noskowskiego 12/14, Poznan, Poland

Keywords: ICT-supported education, e-Classroom.

Abstract: Over the recent years Poland has been very successful in deploying advanced ICT infrastructure for use by

the public sector. This infrastructure includes fiber-based metropolitan research and education networks

interconnected with the backbone optical network PIONIER, and a vast amount of advanced services that

provide interesting resources and tools also for the education sector. Today Poland gains a big opportunity

of innovating its education system to a novel ICT supported classroom immersed in an integrated education

environment. Creating an educational service network based on research and education network links would

bring a new, better learning and teaching experience for the education system participants. However, it also

sets a big challenge before designers of such an educational service network. In this paper, we discuss the

current opportunities and our approach at creating such a network.

1 INTRODUCTION

Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center has

been the operator of the metropolitan research and

education network in Poznan since early 1990s. This

network (POZMAN) was originally founded to

interconnect academic and research centers such as

universities and research institutes. It later became

the means of interconnecting offices of various

public domain services such as municipality offices,

hospitals or public schools. Today, this metropolitan

network provides fiber to 23 schools in Poznan, thus

creating an opportunity to draw a roadmap for

integrating them into one educational corporate

network also on the service level.

An attempt to create an educational service

network is also justified by the existence of various

advanced services that may either deliver interesting

educational content for use during the educational

process or provide a new quality to this process.

These services include regional digital libraries that

provide access to rare library resources, the public

television educational programme offer and archive

delivered through an Internet-based system,

educational portals that provide a vast ammount of

articles, educational resource directories and online

tools, e-learning platforms with materials in the form

of e-courses, videoconferencing services or virtual

laboratories.

Last but not least, also the analysis of the needs

of the education community in Poznan shows that

the delivery of innovative educational tools based on

advanced services available in the metropolitan

research and education network is highly required by

the education community itself. In October 2008 we

conducted a questionnaire among 42 public high

schools which showed that various activities in this

field were already being undertaken by schools and

that there was a high demand for training teachers in

ICT utilization in the educational process.

In this paper we present the value that a research

and education network with its advanced services

may bring to the educational system. In section 2 we

shortly present an example metropolitan research

and education network (MAN) and the wider context

of its interconnection with other such networks in

Poland, Europe and beyond. Section 3 describes

various services currently deployed in the public

optical network and accessible through the MANs.

Section 4 draws a roadmap for building a service

network for education with the use of available ICT

infrastructure. We end with a presentation of related

initiatives in section 5 and a summary in section 6.

Czyrnek M., Koczorowski F., Kosiedowski M., Mazurek C., Pawalowski P., Pieklik W., Stroinski M., Weglarz J. and Werla M. (2009).

SERVICES FOR EDUCATION IN THE METROPOLITAN RESEARCH AND EDUCATION NETWORK.

In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Computer Supported Education, pages 97-103

DOI: 10.5220/0001978200970103

 SciTePress

2 RESEARCH AND EDUCATION

NETWORK

The metropolitan research and education network

POZMAN has been operated by Poznan

Supercomputing and Networking Center since 1993.

It started as FDDI-based network linking major

universities and research institutes in the city. Later,

the base technology was changed to ATM, and other

types of institutions such as, for example,

municipality offices and hospitals were being

connected to the network. Today, the network is

based on 10 Gigabit Ethernet technology and

connects over 100 institutions, including all

academic institutions in Poznan, all municipality

offices, most hospitals and 23 public schools.

Figure 1: PIONIER Polish Optical Internet.

Further on, the metropolitan research and

education network of our city is interconnected with

20 other similar networks around Poland through a

nationwide backbone research and education

network called Polish Optical Internet PIONIER as

shown in Figure 1. This allows for wide cooperation

between institutions connected to metropolitan

research and education networks at the national

level. Such cooperation takes place in the research

and academic community, where common projects

are conducted with the vast utilization of the optical

networking advantages. Some of the most important

initiatives that can be mentioned here include access

to remote instrumentation in the form of virtual

laboratory (Lawenda at al., 2004), provision of

country-wide multimedia content delivery system

(Czyrnek at al., 2006) or organization of the national

Federation of Digital Libraries (Lewandowska,

Mazurek and Werla, 2008).

Moreover, the PIONIER network provides

access to the European research and educational

services through the optical interconnection to the

European academic research network Geant2.

PIONIER also has optical links to all Poland

neighboring countries. This international

connectivity is also used to facilitate cooperation

between fiber-enabled institutions, with a majority

of this cooperation taking place within the scientific

community. Access to CERN’s facilities, integration

with the European digital library Europeana,

performing high definition videoconference sessions

or delivering broadband channels to a vast amount

of research projects is not a problem at the

international level.

It is also important to mention that local,

province-wide initiatives to create broadband

province networks connected to PIONIER take place

in various parts of Poland. For example, the

Swietokrzyskie Province is currently in the process

of building a province-wide broadband with the use

of wireless technologies. In other regions, such as

our province Wielkopolska, the plan is to build local

fiber connections to all counties. The existence of

broadband links in the counties gives the local

governments an opportunity to interconnect

institutions they are responsible for, including public

schools. This process has already begun. Pila, one of

the biggest towns in Wielkopolska, has recently

invested in a fiber connection to one of their primary

schools. Further investments are planned in the

future.

The optical network, operated by a research

center as ours, creates a good opportunity for

delivering a new type of educational materials and a

new type of educational tools to public schools. The

optical link provides schools with a new quality in

the education process they maintain. It is at the same

time received at a reasonable monthly cost of 400

zlotys (about 100 euros) for a 100 Mbps connection.

However, this reasonable cost becomes especially

attractive when the optical link is delivered in a

package including also a set of advanced services

that enable real access to the above-mentioned

educational materials and tools. Examples of such

services already existing today in the PIONIER

network and accessible through metropolitan

research and education networks are presented in the

next section.

3 EDUCATIONAL SERVICES IN

THE RESEARCH AND

EDUCATION NETWORK

The broadband network link such as the optical

connection to a metropolitan research and education

CSEDU 2009 - International Conference on Computer Supported Education

network is a must for the environment aiming at

innovating the educational process with the use of

ICT tools. While this constitutes the necessary start

and a required infrastructure, the core of this

environment are services that are capable of

delivering vast amounts of new educational

materials and tools. In this section we present

examples of such services, currently used in other

contexts than an integrated educational service

network.

Examples of the above-mentioned services that

could enrich the options that schools have at hand

when maintaining their day-to-day work with

students include the following:

 digital libraries;

 multimedia content archives;

 high definition videoconferencing;

 virtual laboratories;

 e-learning platforms;

 and educational web portals.

We discuss the value of each of these services

for the education processes conducted at schools in

the following subsections.

3.1 Digital Libraries

Over the recent few years many digital libraries

holding lots of valuable resources have emerged in

Poland. This includes 14 regional digital libraries

with such libraries as, for example, Wielkopolska

Digital Library (http://www.wbc.poznan.pl/), Lower

Silesian Digital Library (http://www.dbc.wroc.pl/) or

Kujawsko-Pomorska Digital Library

(http://kpbc.umk.pl/) that were built with the use of

the standards-based dLibra framework (Dudczak et

al 2007). What is more important these libraries are

interconnected with each other through OAI-PMH

mechanisms thus creating a nation-wide Federation

of Digital Libraries, which was already mentioned in

section 2. Overall 38 digital libraries are part of this

Federation giving access to a total of over 180

thousand digital objects. One should also not forget

about efforts aiming at integrating the Polish

Federation with the Europeana digital library.

The constantly growing number of digital

objects held by Polish and European digital libraries

may be already accessed today by teachers and

students at schools. These objects constitute a great

value especially for such classes as history,

literature, arts and culture. Some of the objects that

can be found in the Wielkopolska Digital Library,

for example, include rare manuscripts dating from

the 15

century, a collection of local newspapers

from the 19

and early 20

centuries and other

regional artifacts, dating back to 13

century.

Example Wielkopolska Digital Library publications

of educational value are shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Example publications in the Wielkopolska

Digital Library bringing educational value for schools.

3.2 Multimedia Content Archives

Another example of digital content with a great

educational value to the teachers and students at

schools are multimedia found in online archives

such as, for example, the digitized archive

maintained by the Polish public broadcaster TVP

(http://www.itvp.pl/). What is important to note here

is that this multimedia content is distributed within

the PIONIER network with the use of thoroughly

tested, intelligent content delivery system, already

mentioned in section 2.

The TVP online archive holds around 1200

educational audio-visual assets. This includes older

programmes digitized recently, and the current

production which is being digitized and put into the

online archive straight away. These programmes

hold a great value to a number of classes and

courses, including physics, chemistry, nature,

science or history. Example resources are shown in

Figure 3.

SERVICES FOR EDUCATION IN THE METROPOLITAN RESEARCH AND EDUCATION NETWORK

Figure 3: The view at the educational multimedia archive

of the Polish public broadcaster TVP.

3.3 High Definition Videoconferencing

Videoconferencing shows a great potential at

enriching educational experience of students at

school. Different types of videoconferencing

techniques are used at schools already today.

According to a questionnaire conducted among high

schools in our city in October 2008, 8 out of 42

schools own dedicated videoconferencing rooms

with equipment and facilities, that are used during

classes. These are television quality

videoconferencing terminals. However, as the

HDViper project (http://www.hdviper.org/) findings

show, high definition videoconferencing carries

even greater educational potential.

The utilization of HD quality video requires

much higher bandwidths, yet it is fully justified by

the much better user experience. The latter is

especially true for such educational performances as

for example chemical experiments where the

visibility of details is vital, or e-meetings of students

from remote schools where high video quality

constitutes a better feeling of presence. A

questionnaire conducted within the HDViper project

with a number of actual high school teachers showed

that there is a widespread agreement that

videoconferencing gives new possibilities in

education. The teachers pointed to a number of uses

of videoconferencing like cooperation on joint

projects between schools, interviews with famous

people, participation in seminars or scientific

experiments and activities with individual students.

3.4 Virtual Laboratories

Virtual laboratory systems provide means of remote

access to unique laboratory equipment from the

comfort of one’s desk. They are mainly used by

scientists to access expensive and rare equipment,

often in a collaborative manner allowing to perform

observations on a scale unknown before. An

example of such an infrastructure may be remote

radio-telescope access which allows astrophysicists

to use over 20 radio-telescopes distributed across 6

continents to achieve a high resolution image of a

given fragment of the sky (Okon et al., 2009).

Virtual laboratories in the context of mandatory

education will not involve access to expensive

equipment and infrastructures such as the

above-mentioned radio-telescopes. This concept can

be used to access limited laboratory instrumentation

at either selected schools in a given geographical

jurisdiction or at university laboratories. However,

virtual laboratory platforms come with advanced

simulation and visualization tools which can be used

by school with virtually no limit, thus giving access

to results of actual scientific experiments performed

with the use of the aforementioned expensive

infrastructures such as radio-telescopes. This creates

an opportunity for innovative educational scenarios

and enrichment of traditional science, physics or

chemistry classes.

3.5 e-Learning Platforms

e-Learning platforms such as, for example, the open

source Moodle (Rice, 2008) have been known for

quite a few years now. The emergence of the

SCORM format enabled standardization of e-course

creation thus facilitating its exploitation within the

education sector. Many universities currently use

some form of e-learning. In Poznan also the

Teacher’s Training Center (ODN – Osrodek

Doskonalenia Nauczycieli) uses an e-learning

platform to offer various e-courses aimed at

upgrading skills of public school teachers.

The above-mentioned questionnaire we

conducted in 42 high schools in Poznan showed that

8 of them are maintaining their internal e-learning

platforms used to create and utilize educational

materials for students in the form of e-courses.

Furthermore, 80% of schools cooperate with various

universities which provide valuable e-courses on

selected subjects. With the emergence of optical

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100

links at schools it is natural to think of enabling their

internal e-learning resources together with the

materials provided by universities to the totality of

schools, thus equalizing access to these resources,

reducing costs of their creation and enabling their

sharing and reuse.

3.6 Educational Web Portals

A vast number of educational resources can also be

found on the web, especially within educational

portals such as the Polish Educational Portal

“Interkl@sa” (http://www.interklasa.pl/). Such

portals contain lots of useful educational materials

and provide interesting tools for use within the

educational process. For example, the above-

mentioned “Interkl@sa” portal provides access to

over 5500 articles catalogued within subject

subpages. It also delivers various specialized tools

such as web educational resource directory, “Virtual

Classroom”, chat or Frantice, a French language

vortal.

Access to the resources of web educational

portals does not require an optical link to the

metropolitan research and education network.

However, it constitutes a value that should be

combined with the services mentioned above to

deliver an integrated educational environment of

resources and tools that enables to provide means for

the application of an innovative classroom. We

discuss how this should be done in the next section.

4 BUILDING AN EDUCATIONAL

SERVICE NETWORK

Having the fiber-based broadband link to the

Internet and a critical mass of digital resources and

tools available online, schools may begin to organize

improved education courses supported vastly by ICT

use. To this end, two elements must get integrated

into an educational service network. First, one must

define an organizational framework for cooperation

between schools and other educational institutions

within the assumed educational scenarios. Second,

an appropriate approach at the integration of ICT

infrastructure should be assumed. We discuss both

these issues in this section.

4.1 Organization of Educational

Scenarios in the Service Network

When designing an organizational structure of the

educational service network, one must first of all

understand what types of relations may exist

between actors participating in scenarios that can be

supported with the use of this network. Our analysis

and discussion with the education community,

represented by the most active high school principals

in the city, shows that there are 4 categories of actors

delivering and/or utilizing the educational services

in such a network. These are students (S), teachers

(T), Universities (U) and methodological centers

such as the aforementioned ODN (M). The relations

between these actors are presented in Figure 4.

S T

Figure 4: The relations between actors with the

educational service net: S – students, T – teachers, U –

universities, M – methodological centers.

Further on, these actors as listed above, may take

different roles in five educational scenarios we

found on the base of our discussions and the

questionnaire we conducted in October 2008. These

scenarios include:

 supporting traditional classroom with

educational services of the network, for

example, reaching to online resources as a

teaching aid in the classroom;

 complementary education with the use of

educational services of the network, for

example, students preparing projects based on

resources found within the network;

 utilization of university resources in high

school education, for example, organization of

special laboratory e-presentations;

 utilization of educational services of the

network in out-of-classroom education, for

example, for the most talented students or

students that cannot participate in classroom

activities for a given period of time;

 teacher improvement with the use of

educational services of the network, for

example, utilization of e-learning platforms to

provide improvement e-courses.

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101

In each of these scenarios not only passive

utilization of services and resources takes place, but

the actors may also actively cooperate with each

other on the inter-institution level. That imposes

important requirement of a careful design of the new

processes that take place in this new environment.

To this end key participants in the value-chain such

as the local governments that administer the local

education systems must undertake the role of

designing the new process workflow. In the case of

our activities aiming at establishing an educational

service network, this role has been undertaken by the

Department of Education of the Poznan City Hall.

4.2 Integration of ICT Infrastructure

for the Delivery of Educational

Services

When it comes to the integration of the educational

service network at the technical level, three major

requirements must be taken into consideration.

These requirements are as follows:

 ease of service utilization;

 ease of resources and tools reuse;

 privacy and security.

In relation to the ease of service utilization two

important issues are worth considering. First of them

is the appropriately designed user gateway to the

service network. This not only includes easy-to-use

user interface but, more importantly, seamless

integration of the underlying systems. The users

should be able to access any of the services with the

use of a single authentication mechanism in a single

sign on manner. That imposes a requirement on the

middleware layer of the service network to enable

single sign on in the whole environment and to

contain necessary interfaces to all heterogeneous

underlying systems such as digital libraries,

multimedia content delivery systems or virtual

laboratories.

Reuse of resources and tools is especially

important in this type of environment. This should

be first of all addressed in the context of reusing the

same resources in various scenarios and

applications. It is also important that any new

resource that gets created within the network is

easily noted by other users. In the context of

resource reuse semantic web technologies show a

good potential. To this end the middleware layer of

the educational service network infrastructure should

get equipped with means of semantic description of

resources and tools, and in mechanisms enabling

automatic search for relations between documents

according to the designed ontologies immersed in

the educational service network. Appropriately

defined ontologies will certainly help to facilitate

reuse and sharing of resources in this network.

Finally, the privacy and security issue is

connected with two important issues. First is to

protect the personal data of actors involved in the

utilization of services in the educational service

network. This especially refers to the students

various information on whom, such as the level of

their skills, possible illnesses and/or disabilities,

political and religious beliefs and others, may be

found in the network. They should be protected with

appropriate privacy protection techniques. The other

issue refers to the protection of content provided

within the network. This includes the content

produced by each school, e.g. provided through their

e-learning platforms, and the content enabled for use

only within the educational service net, e.g. some

specific content of television archives which could

be enabled for educational purposes, while at the

same time cannot be enabled for general public

access. In both cases the existence of a coherent

corporate network built on top of the metropolitan

research and education network will help to achieve

the goal of privacy and security protection.

5 RELATED WORK

One of the brightest examples of educational service

networks is Glow

(http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/glowscotland/), the

Scottish part of the National Education Network

(http://www.nen.gov.uk/) in the United Kingdom.

Glow is “the world's first national intranet for

education.” It delivers a trusted and safe

environment where one can create personalized

programmes, share resources, use a variety of online

tools to enhance learning experiences and

collaborate with others across the network. The

resources come from different sources and can either

be accessed from any place after a successful login

or are available for access only from schools, e.g. in

the case of a music archive. In the United States, the

Utah Education Network (http://ww.uen.org/)

connects Utah’s public schools with high speed links

and provides various services such as interactive

videoconferencing, e-trainings, e-learning or Internet

television.

Important for our work are also advancements in

the field of various applications and tools that could

be utilized to improve the quality of education at

schools. One of such advancements is the subject of

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the VccSSe project

(http://www.vccsse.ssai.valahia.ro/) which aims to

adapt virtual laboratory techniques for utilization

within education processes at school. The work of

the project focuses mainly on mathematics, physics,

chemistry and biology and involves schools from

Romania, Poland, Spain, Finland and Greece. The

use of high definition videoconferencing in

education is the subject of the aforementioned

HDViper project.

Finally, an important field of our attention is the

use of semantic web techniques for facilitating

access to resources and services. A very interesting

work in this field is done within the OASIS project

(http://www.oasis-project.eu/). This project develops

the so called OASIS hyper-ontology, which aims to

interconnect heterogeneous ontologies to achieve the

sharing of contextual information between different

objects and services (Kehagias et al., 2008). While

the primary application of this hyper-ontology

architectural concept is for seamless service

provision to the elderly, it shows a potential for

utilization also in other fields, such as, for example,

an educational service network.

6 SUMMARY

In this paper we have presented a concept of

building an integrated environment for the provision

of services for education in a metropolitan research

and education network. On the basis of a

questionnaire we conducted in October 2008, we

were able to draw a list of requirements for the

initiative aiming to build such an educational service

network. Furthermore, we found what usage

scenarios are expected in this network and what is

the necessary critical mass to start the work on the

establishment of this environment.

An important message coming from the

education community was also their need to utilize

the resources already existing and available in the

metropolitan research and education network that we

operate. This becomes available today with the

optical link directly reaching schools in our city and

with useful technologies such as semantic web at

hand. Our goal is to work in this direction with the

relevant stakeholders in our region to deliver this

sort of integrated environment where ease of use,

reuse and sharing of resources, as well as privacy

and security are main drivers of the innovative

education experience.

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