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'Bandwidth Divide' Could Bar Some From Free Online Courses
An anonymous reader writes "The Bandwidth Divide is a form of what economists call the Red Queen effect referring to a scene in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass when Alice races the Red Queen. As the Red Queen tells Alice: 'It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!' Keeping up with digital technology is like that race — it takes a continual investment of money and time just to keep up with the latest, and an exceptional amount of work to get ahead of the pack. 'The question is, What is the new basic?' said one researcher. 'There will always be inequality. But 100 years after the introduction of the car, not everybody has a Ferrari, but everyone has access to some form of motorized transportation through buses.' Well, not everyone, but even fewer people have the online equivalent. Colleges considering MOOCs should remember that."
here we go again
Simple as that.
I find it Intereresting and disturbing that in the US we provide "Universal Service" for many old technologies - US Mail, Analog Telephones, and T1s, but we don't even have a discussion about universal broadband.
The difference between those who have access to fast connections and those who have only dial-up speeds or access via a cellphone is "bigger than people think," he said.
Quick. Name three people you know (not just people you've heard of) who fall into the above category because "fast connections" are not physically available to them.
to strip off all the scripts and redirects and google metrics and all the crap that chokes away the real bandwidth of the hardware. Then you can access the actual *information* you wanted.
Mostly random stuff.
Water is wet, rich people have more stuff, and good looking people get laid more.
Not everyone has access to MIT's online classes. Not everyone has access to MIT's in-person classes either.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Higher education (college, university, whatever you want to call it) has never that I know of been considered a "right" to be enjoyed by all. It has always been reserved for the financially well-off (those who can afford it), the financially stupid (those willing to take on loads of debt for something not guaranteed to provide a return on investment), and the financially gifted (those given scholarships for any number of reasons).
There have also always been people who don't fit in any of the above categories, to whom a formal higher education is denied. Some of them make up for it through self-motivated study, obtaining books from the nearby library, etc. I suspect the free online courses appeal most to this class of people, and I suggest that if they are sufficiently motivated, available broadband internet will not be a limiting factor. There are still books available covering most material needed, and anything only available online can be accessed at a local library or similar place in any developed country.
For those who might say "what about the undeveloped countries," I say those people have bigger things to worry about, like where the next meal is coming from, how to get clean water, etc.
So what's the question? If you have enough bandwidth you have enough bandwidth. Do you really care that your video stream is more compressed than the next guy as long as it's viewable? How much bandwidth you need to be able to watch a presentation is something you can measure. How much that is relative to how much some other guy has is irrelevant. Content should generally be aimed at the low end of your expected users and kept there.
'The question is, What is the new basic?'
Answer: VB.NET - even if it isn't that new, there's none newer that that. (question is: will it still rot your brain?)
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Would the equivalent not be a public library? Bandwidth isn't an issue (at least at my tiny local branch) since I see people there stream videos on their Facebook and Youtube all the time. Which makes me think access isn't as much of an issue as converting people who consume to people who invest in themselves. Now, global access disparity is another issue, and it'll take more than the US alone to deal with it.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
We don't have a discussion about universal cell phone access or universal groceries access either.
I guesd you're not familiar with Obama Phones. 4G is now an entitlement. That's where the $12.50 / month "universal access fee" you pays goes. When the FCC looked into it, at least 41% of recipients aren't actually eligible - they make more than enough to buy their own phones, but they had you buy them one instead.
As far as universal groceries, 11% of Americans recieve food stamps, and grocery-related entitlements cost about 9% of the total GDP. For readers not familiar with economics jargon, for every $100 you earn, roughly $20 of that goes to pay for someone else's bills through various taxpayer funded programs.
TFA refers to a pilot project by fairfax county schools. their project would not have failed miserably if they implemented it properly: with offline-capable ereaders preloaded with the proper texts and materials.. but instead, they opted for content and a system that required internet access (presumably due to drm at the publisher's insistance) to use, which limited access to those with sufficient internet access at home AND limited _where_ students could read and study their texts. a preloaded offline ereader would have eliminated those major issues with a conversion to digital texts. if fairfax county school board had listened to complaints and concerns expressed prior to them choosing this defective system, and not gotten memorized by slick salesmen, their system _could have been_ a model for public schools nationwide - instead they just fucked up big time.
I've taught courses online for a regional university in Appalachia and had to design the courses specifically with bandwidth limitations in mind. Of the students who had home internet access, some were limited to dial-up or very slow DSL. Many students rely on internet access at public libraries and thus I had to create materials they could bring home for study. I could never assume constant access on the student's part. I made heavy use of public-domain sources as primary texts (I'm a historian), knowing these could be readily transferred to any machine, even a cell phone if necessary (of course, cell phone access can kind of suck out here too).
Courses can still be taught under these conditions, but a teacher cannot use multimedia as a crutch and must focus instead on course structure, careful selection of readings, and heavy use of lower bandwidth tools like message boards. I made any multimedia material optional and supplementary.
The question of technology, however, is not the chief problem with online courses in these circumstances. The chief problem is that the courses themselves are being used to advance the notion that education is a series of hoops, the easier to jump through the better. They're an administrator's dream. More degrees generated at lower cost.
The contention is that the 'bandwidth divide' will keep low income students from participating in free online courses because they lack high-speed broadband is, to me, verging on the ridiculous.
College now costs over $10K a year, on-line courses can bring that cost down to a number approaching zero, but because it is 'unreasonable' to expect students getting thousands of dollars worth of free education to spring for reasonable broadband service (estimated at $50/mo) we are considering this a problem? Four years of the best service Verizon offers for home access ($200/mo x 48 months) is LESS than one year in university. Scale down the bandwidth demands and you can do it for much less.
Shouldn't free courses and free e-textbooks free-up some money for the student to buy broadband access if they don't already have it?
Or do we need to offer students free courses with free books accessed on free bandwidth from their free computers that run on free electricity?
Ken
I have been taking some excellent coursera courses which are probably somewhat typical in overall bandwidth needs. The only real bandwidth hog would be the videos which I usually download to my iPad. So short of a 56k Modem I might have to wait for these videos but with only minor delays almost any crappy bandwidth would allow me to take these courses. Also keep in mind that determined people also have sneakernets. That is someone in my group of friends will grab the data and then using USB memory sticks will distribute the goods around. I remember in the early days of the Internet one friend would grab something and then burn the amazing hundreds of megs to CD. And before that one person would grab 3 or more floppies from a BBS and then we would all faithfully copy them. Before that it was pure floppy to floppy movement of data. So saying that you are on the wrong side of a bandwidth margin is just bizarre.
So unless all the MOOCs suddenly change their model to highly interactive 3D environments I suspect that most learners with the most moderate internet access will be just fine.
Only the caveat of some kind of skype type live learning would demand goodish bandwidth but I don't see much education heading that way except for those services that are determined to maintain their tutoring per hour business models which really wouldn't apply to the same people who are supposedly on the wrong side of the digital divide.
And on top of all that my experience in poorer countries is that internet access is really cheap by our standards and their infrastructure is leapfrogging ours. In Jamaica for instance for $40 a month you get unlimited 3G data access nearly everywhere along the coast and as for tethering they sell cool d-link wi-fi routers that you put a SIM card into to have home internet.
If you are a kid in a poor place a bit of industriousness in obtaining a crap old pentium(or raspberry pi), a CRT, a USB stick, and occasional internet access and you will be able to fill your brain with all you ever wanted. Add in an NGO with the goal of making this easier and whole communities will be just fine.
98.2% of the US have download speeds >3 Mbps available. That is more than enough for online video and just about anything else you might want to do on the Internet.
And for $30-50/month, you get a service that gives you free phone service, free university lectures, free access to millions of books , free or cheap movies and TV shows, business directories, and tons of other content. You basically don't need any other communication, education, or entertainment service these days. And yet, people keep complaining as if things are getting worse and worse.
How can someone who works or goes to school Monday through Friday visit a public library that's closed evenings, Saturdays, and Sundays?
Once they have broadband Internet they can order food, water, and clothes from Amazon
That's not so easy if the area they live in doesn't have regular mail service due to lack of reliable roads. Nor is it easy if their country has an undervalued currency due to not having much of an export sector.
So Broadband libraries can help a lot
Provided that states can find the money to keep them open on evenings and weekends.
I've been seeing increasing evidence that students in poorer neighborhoods are using the McLibrary -- McDonalds outfitted with free wifi -- as a means to access the internet. It's a very interesting phenomenon!
... than high speed internet? Dude, where the hell do you live? It sure as hell ain't anywhere I've ever heard about. I do also have to point out, it hasn't been one hundred years since the creation of the internet, yet you expect the same level of infrastructure to be in place after, what, some forty years?
Speaking a bit more on the article, as a resident in Maryland and 20 miles from DC, it's bullshit. The DC metro area has access to very high-speed broadband - some people just choose not to purchase it, which is a very different thing than the implication in the article. The worst case scenario is that the kids have to go to the local libraries to use it - or perhaps stay a bit later at the schools. There is no "bandwidth divide" going by the definition implied in the article.
Remember, you can't look dignified when your having fun! Don't take life too seriously, you'll never get out of it alive
Do you really care that your video stream is more compressed than the next guy as long as it's viewable? How much bandwidth you need to be able to watch a presentation is something you can measure. [...] Content should generally be aimed at the low end of your expected users
The low end is dial-up. With packet overhead and nominal loss, you can't count on V.90 to deliver more than 40 kbps. Traditional video codecs don't go that low, which is the whole reason that formats like SWF were created. Sure, so many people love to hate SWF, but vector animation and stills (think seconds per frame, not frames per second) are the only way to get any sort of audiovisual presentation in that sort of data rate.
Unless your video format is really broken, you don't have to do anything special for video
Publishers of videos distributed under proprietary commercial licenses tend to prefer intentionally broken formats. These publishers use digital restrictions management to deter casual copyright infringement or charge the advertisers per impression.
The difference between those who have access to fast connections and those who have only dial-up speeds or access via a cellphone is "bigger than people think," he said.
Quick. Name three people you know (not just people you've heard of) who fall into the above category because "fast connections" are not physically available to them.
Anyone you know who is classified as "rural". Where I live the local Ski resort and a couple other towns actually have access to cable internet. In a broad circle around those large towns some small towns have DSL. In a broader circle than that or between towns there is a company that provides internet wirelessly from towers. If you don't live line of sight from those towers and you aren't in a town, your best options are dial up or (ever so slightly better) satellite. I'm lucky enough to be in a location where I can get DSL or the wireless. As long as the wrong tree doesn't get too tall, anyway. Then wireless is out.
So I picked DSL. It is crap in this location. I get 3/4 of what I pay for in bandwidth. It starts to go down every time the temperature drops below 30, especially when all the kids get home from school. I got to talking with some others around town and the whole town has similar performance.
I can sort of stream netflix depending on the time and temperature. If it's nice and the kids are in school, no interruptions. Class lets out and the temperature drops and I can restart my video every 5 minutes due to down time. (Or, more likely, go read a book.)
Before I submit this, I will check my modem to make sure I am still connected to the internet. It could go any moment....
Technically, I have broadband. Functionally, I do not. I could watch videos posted online for classes, but I could not participate in a live session. I can't have a job that requires a solid internet connection, either.
I'd love to move, but I'm one of those people who is environmentally sensitive and this is the best place I've lived for my health in 15 years.
You may have noticed I left out cell phone data streams as an internet option. That can work on a case by case basis. At many homes here we are lucky to even have voice available. When I was shopping for a new service provider, most of the voice maps stopped right by the town I live in and Data was just pooled around the local Ski resort.
So in answer to your question, I actually know more people who don't have access to broadband than do. I live in Colorado.
The colleges need to make available low-bandwidth video version of any video courses. These would have lower resolution video than usual, but still maintain high quality audio so that the speech is clear. And the video needs to be reviewed to make sure that the low resolution is good enough to show the details in math, text or experiments, that the instructor expects.
What we really need is special tools to help instructors create low bandwidth videos that will work OK on dialup connections where downloads take a long time. In fact it would be best to supply students with special download tools which pull down videos overnight when networks are less congested in rural areas.
reasonable broadband service (estimated at $50/mo)
Would you find a 10 GB per month cap reasonable? Because that's what Exede includes in its $50 package.
Note that that $50/month also lets people replace many other subscriptions and services, like phone service.
In areas unserved by cable or DSL, I don't see how voice over satellite Internet can replace POTS given the time for light to travel to geostationary orbit and back. Or were you referring to cellular Internet, with its even stricter monthly data cap?
Meanwhile, in related news, the Whining Divide could bar some people from WAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaAAAAAAAaaaaaHHHHHHH!!!
WAAAaaaaaAAAAAAAAaaaaaaahhHHHHHHhhh!
Researchers have said they're working on solutions to address this.
I'm more concerned about the Can't-Get-My-Fat-Lazy-Ass-Out-of-Bed divide. It's really demoralizing to some of us who've been left bed-ridden, watching life pass us by.
Here I am wasting my life on Slashdot, when I could be living a much more enriching and fulfilling life.
Please donate -- because An Ass Is a Terrible Thing to Waist
Today (in 2013!!) I attempted to register for a free Pfofessional Development course offered by a science teachers' organization. I could register but was informed that since I was not running a compatible system (which would be Windows or Mac) I cannot participate.
This is not the first such event I have missed. It is extremely distressing. I am a die hard GNU/Linux user. I forego these opportunities. Others don't.
It is wrong. I hear you, things are indeed getting better. To what extent, however, are these organizations infiltrated by commercial interests, or, on the other hand, are the majority of scientists and teachers already in thrall of Microsoft? It all seems to very easy. Yet, one trembles to consider the possible implications of this all.
Anon
Indeed, one can become educated if one chooses to. I not only don't have a college degree, I don't have a high school diploma. Yet, I develop and maintain the the online learning system for a major state university system agency. I'm a kernel and Apache contributor, so I am educated. My father grew up living in a tent with a dirt floor. Later, he was an oil company VP flying around on the corporate jet. He had never seen a toothbrush until third grade, much less any technology, yet he worked his way to a country club membership, thereby proving all my excuses to be BS.
There are exactly two reasons that an American may be uneducated - because they choose to be, and major brain injury/disease.
While its great to see the introduction of free online courses, some even with real credits, coming to market, to annihilate the education-industrial-complex, their generosity does not in turn require us to collectively underwrite "better broadband" for the few places that lack it.
If you choose to live in the middle of nowhere, where the density simply doesn't support the huge capital expense required for wired broadband, then you get wireless, which includes satellite, and you make do. If that's not enough, then you move.
my wife is taking mostly online classes, and though a 4 year degree progressing to a bachelors the only class that was bandwidth intensive was Spanish cause they had some shitty videos to watch
really people, its some forums, email, upload a word doc or a pdf and email
not ground breaking stuff here, its education ... your lucky if they surpassed 1998
You're not very good at this. Perhaps you should head back to reddit and try to learn to troll there.
This is so far down the page that likely no one will see it but I am posting for the record.
From Pew ...
In April of 2009, 7% of American adults age 18+ used dial-up internet at home. (As of April 2012, this number is 3%) These are the reasons they gave for not switching to broadband.
Price must fall -- 35%
Nothing would get me to switch -- 20%
Don't know -- 16%
It would have to become available where I live -- 17%
Other -- 13%
http://pewinternet.org/Commentary/2012/May/Pew-Internet-Broadband.aspx
So, in this survey, only 17% of 3% said that high speed internet was unavailable.
The reason we don't have universal broadband access is because rich white people want to keep poor black people living in poverty, because that keeps rich white people rich.
It's it obvious that allowing poor black people to be successful is a grave threat to the richness or rich white people? And, it's it furthermore obvious that giving poor black people fast access to the Internet would mean the instant destruction of rich white wealth?
Duh.
All MOOCs I've taken (about a dozen) allowed me to download the videos, either by providing a download link or because they used Youtube or some other DRM-free video host. It's simple to download from those by either copying the URL from the DOM or using a browser addon. The only exception is in-video quizzes on Coursera, but those are optional anyway, and you can just as well pause the video at the quiz and write the answers down before continuing. I was able to follow my courses without problem even in places with extremely bad internet connection. Just use a download manager and watch the lectures offline.
How is that in any way relevant to a teacher creating their own online courses and videos?
You assume that school systems would have their own teachers creating online courses instead of subcontracting it out to the copyright industry the way they already have done with textbooks. Explain why you believe your assumption holds, and then based on your explanation, I'll explain how it's relevant.
If few people use voice over satellite, then the person on the other end of the line won't have had much experience speaking to users of voice over satellite and thus won't have had much of a chance to adapt. An example of such a person inexperienced with voice over satellite could be an employer, who chooses to interview someone who uses POTS or wired VoIP over someone who uses voice over satellite because the faster response of the wired solution conveys less of an impression of hesitation and thus more of an impression of being able to think on one's feet.
There are almost no areas unserved by cable, DSL, or land-based wireless
Good luck watching video on your "land-based wireless" with its 5 GB per month data cap.
http://www.broadbandmap.gov/summarize/nationwide
We discussed that in a Slashdot story from about two years ago. One comment points out that the National Broadband Map's methodology might be flawed: "they said the initiative says that if ONE person in a zipcode has access to broadband, they mark that entire zip code as 'yes'".
We live in a rural area, at the time we only had satellite internet with a 325MB per day limit (then they cut your speed 90%) , my wife was taking on line classes and they had hours and hours of streaming only videos to watch. She could only watch a little over an hour before we would get cut off for 24 hours. I ended up find some stream rippers meant mainly saving peoples po0n and was able to save the videos at work, then bring them home on thumb drives. The college gave no downloading options, it was stream only and no streaming options (high or low bandwidth). We have since been able to get 3G wireless from Verizon, which is much faster, but still have monthly limits that prevent us from watching netflix, youtube and whenever possible, I still download large update files at work and bring them home.
Once I made the jump from dial up to whatever the basic braodband speed at the time was, I was happy.
But no doubt the large media organisations will keep developing content that requires their special 4 billion Gbps delivery system to enjoy fully.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I can go get 3 megabits at an Arby's. WTF are they talking about? If you want to attend online courses, it's your own dumb fault if you live out in the middle of nowhere. How about you complain about gas prices and the long drive time some more too? Other than rural areas, you can go take online courses by taking a laptop and walking outside and then standing basically anywhere.
I think the universities, and all other public institutions as well, should be prohibited from offering anything that is not accessible by every doofus in the country, no matter what their ethnicity, native language, income level or the location of their domicile. They can't just serve the privileged few who can afford broadband service or, for that matter, college tuition. All innovation that is not immediately available to everyone in the society should be suppressed until it is. Otherwise, how can we say we're a fair society?
There will always be poor people.
Most online courses are voice with some whiteboarding or slides (coursera, opencourseware, khan academy). It should be relatively easy to produce low-bandwidth versions if you remove the video of the talking face.
Voice and slides don't need much bandwidth. Whiteboarding doesn't need much either, if it is properly encoded.
The poor peoples aren't getting something! Quick, make the government do something! Government fix everything!
There are almost no areas unserved by cable, DSL, or land-based wireless.
Almost no implies that there still are a few. City and county school systems could lose their state funding, and states could lose their federal funding, for failing to provide for these few students.
If you think cost and access are problems in poor and rural parts of the US, consider the plight of people in developing nations. The potential for online education is great: http://cis471.blogspot.com/2012/05/online-education-market-is-global.html but sufficiently cheap, fast access typically non-existent: http://cis471.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-access-and-bandwidth-divide-in.html
Land-based wireless doesn't refer to mobile, it refers to microwave and WLAN.
I'll grant you that microwave exists, but I was lumping it with cellular because both Clearwire microwave Internet access and Sprint mobile Internet access share a last mile. And how is WLAN a last mile solution? I was under the impression that a wireless local area network was for splitting up Internet access after it had already reached the premises. Or are you referring to trading in your desktop PC for a laptop and driving to a restaurant or library as "WLAN service"?
show some better data
How recent you desire this "better data" to be for you to accept it?