Cisco Connected Real Estate Buildings Spell a New Class of Campuses in the Education Sector

May 3, 2006

By Jason Deign, News@Cisco

A Cisco Systems® infrastructure framework is providing the UK with a growing number of educational buildings that are in a class of their own.

The framework is the Cisco Connected Real Estate (CCRE) solution, part of the Cisco Connected Learning blueprint that helps higher education institutions provide highly secure access to all educational resources, anytime, anywhere.

Crossways Academy in Lewisham, South London, for example, has everything from campus-wide WiFi access to in-class video streaming, supported along with all aspects of building management, security and communications on a single Cisco IP network.

At Crossways they even take the class register on the touch screen of a Cisco IP Phone and enjoy better communication within the school and with parents thanks to unified messaging.

Other UK examples of world-class buildings providing world-class education include:

• Falmouth College of Arts, in Cornwell, Southwest England, which reduced capital and operating expenditure at a new £80 million campus by putting all its building management systems and communications on a single IP network that can be managed remotely.
• Nearly 30 schools in Newport, Wales, which have seen a reduction of 41 percent in vandalism and theft costs in one year, thanks to IP CCTV running over a network with centralized recording and monitoring.
• Nottingham Trent University, in the Midlands, which runs all heating, hot water and air conditioning systems in each of its sites and buildings using a single IP network, allowing engineers to carry out routine maintenance without having to physically visit each building.
• Venerable Bede Church of England (Aided) Secondary School in Sunderland, Northeast England, which opened in 2003 with an IP-enabled cashless canteen where students pay using smartcards that contain information on food allergies and free meal eligibility, which helps reduce bullying and theft.
• Walsall Academy, near Birmingham, which has TV, video and IP telephony in every class and has eradicated vandalism thanks to CCTV, all supported by Cisco AVVID (Architecture for Voice, Video and Integrated Data).

Following the success of a conference called World Class Buildings for World Class Education, hosted by Cisco in 2005, schools and further education and higher education bodies are in talks to develop a blueprint for the sector.

The moves were echoed in a speech to vice chancellors by UK Secretary of State for Education Ruth Kelly, on the duty of care and security that schools, colleges and universities have for their students on campus.

Schools and colleges that have so far adopted CCRE are discovering that it not only cuts costs but also changes the ways that teaching can be delivered.

Having video and multimedia in the classroom means lessons can be filmed and delivered off-site or stored for later study, for example.

These new ways of teaching call for more flexible spaces within buildings, says Dr Michelle Selinger, worldwide education strategist at Cisco.

"Instead of five classes taking math at the same time, you could have one major class for everyone in a year, followed by breakout sessions," she says.

"We are seeing a change from the standard classrooms we know to a variety of room sizes and learning spaces, similar to how many businesses construct their new buildings."

In the UK Department for Education and Skills (DfES) information and communications technology (ICT) test bed in Barking and Dagenham Local Education Authority, every classroom is equipped with a teacher PC, digital projector, wireless slate and video Visualizer.

The classroom technology is supported by whole school wireless networks and an authority-wide Ethernet Metropolitan Area Network giving all schools access to media-rich curriculum resources in a central data center.

This has completely transformed lessons, enabling teachers to prepare lessons from home on their laptops with secure remote access to all the faculties on the network.

Lessons are delivered on a large projector screen at the front of the classroom, while the wireless slate allows the teacher to write on the board and control the content from anywhere in the classroom; they can even hand over the slate for the pupils to use.

For the first time ever teachers are no longer anchored to the front of the classroom.

The experience with this new approach to whole-class teaching with ICT has enabled lessons to become more stimulating and interactive. It also reduces preparation times while improving classroom discipline.

The video Visualizer encourages blended learning. For example, in biology the teacher can place a flower under the Visualizer and a huge live image is projected at the font of the classroom; the image can be captured and pupils learn by annotating the elements of the flower.

Barking and Dagenham has moved away from the old fashioned concept of the PC lab, where the pupils have to come to the ICT. Rather, they have Computers On Wheels (COWs) - laptops stored on trolleys that can be brought into any classroom, or indeed taken on a field trip.

For example, in music pupils frequently use laptops with music creation software as well as real instruments, which has been found to both improve their attainment in the subject and to teach the important skill of using digital music which is now commonplace in the music industry.

The e-Learning Foundation, a UK organization launched in 2001 to significantly increase access to ICT in UK education, is taking this even further with a national scheme that enables parents to lease laptops, for their children, from their school while the school takes advantage of special tax breaks to fund laptop provision for low-income families.

Creating the conditions for this level of innovation is relatively simple and cost-effective if CCRE is specified at the planning stage of a new educational establishment.

This can help reduce the construction time and costs of the building, for example by eliminating the need for multiple separate wiring systems, and create a more stimulating, effective learning environment.

Studies show that for a new building the cost of the communication infrastructure is usually between 1.5 and two percent of the building costs and is considerably less than installing gas, water and electricity.

Yet such a small investment can have repercussions throughout the 15 to 25-year life of a building.

Roughly 75 percent of a building's lifecycle costs occur in the maintenance and operating period, when the building is in use and an intelligent CCRE building design can significantly reduce operating costs.

Jason Deign is a freelance journalist located in Barcelona, Spain.