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Pathways
Pathways and the pioneering spirit
Pathways World School has successfully
conceptualised and deployed a wireless network that many corporates
would find hard to match. Shipra Arora reports
Implementing a cutting-edge
education system isn’t easy. Pathways World School, an international
baccalaureate school situated off Gurgaon-Sohna road near Delhi,
has taken up the gauntlet. It has used wireless technology to create
an educational system that radically differs from the traditional
Indian model. Pathways has deployed a campus-wide wireless local
area network (WLAN) across a 30-acre campus with around 40 access
points. The WLAN was designed and deployed by IBM using Cisco wireless
equipment and firewalls, along with IBM servers and ThinkPads. The
WLAN is being used by faculty and students (sixth grade and higher;
almost 60 percent of the total student population). The school plans
to quadruple the number of students on its rolls from the present
300 to 1,200 over the next two years.
The WLAN initiative has helped
Pathways create a learning-based education system. Pathways director
Prabhat Jain says that though the school became operational in April
2003, research on education processes started back in late 1999,
and case studies from various American schools were analysed by
consultants. Pathways picked up the concept of a ‘notebook cart’
that has 10-30 wireless notebooks moving to the classrooms. This
concept was expanded upon, leading to the decision to go in for
a wireless network. Currently there are 150 notebook users and this
is expected to increase to 1,200 in the future.The project kicked
off in October 2002, and was completed in three months at a cost
of around Rs 1 crore.
‘Anytime, anywhere’ education
In a learning-based system,
teachers act as facilitators by giving projects to students who
learn from books, CD-ROMs and the Internet. Since learning was going
to be project-based, the school decided to adopt a model without
fixed seating patterns within a classroom, resulting in the need
to move around within the classroom. Pathways also wanted to introduce
the concept of ‘anytime, anywhere’ learning. Students can sit anywhere
in the campus (park, amphitheatre, dining room or their own rooms)
and do their projects, submit assignments, send e-mail to teachers,
access library resources over the intranet, research papers and
access the Internet. This required wireless connectivity.
"The idea is to make education
an enjoyable experience for students, rather than imposing it on
them. For this we created very interesting spaces within the campus,
and did not want to be restricted by the constraints of sitting
in one particular place. Mobility is the key, and we realised that
WLAN enables all these things," explains Jain.
Rolling out WiFi
For the WLAN solution, the
school zeroed in on Cisco. What tipped the balance in Cisco’s favour
was its strong support and maintenance network in India. The Cisco
WLAN solution at Pathways comprises Cisco Aironet 1200 Series access
points, Gigabit LAN switches for the backbone network, and firewall
security. The solution is future-proof as it gives the school the
option of upgrading to 802.11g at a later date. The wireless access
points supplied are compatible with 802.11g. Right now Pathways
is using the popular 802.11b standard, with access speeds of up
to 11 Mbps. The option of upgrading to the faster 802.11g standard
providing up to 54 Mbps connectivity on the same 2.4 GHz frequency
gives the school room to grow.
IBM did the implementation,
and provided servers and wireless-enabled ThinkPads. Pathways has
deployed two IBM X-235 servers; one is an application server running
on Windows 2000, the second is a Linux-based Internet proxy (controlling
Internet access of students, and restricting specific sites.) "Since
IBM and Cisco are partners, it made sense to implement their solutions,"
says Jain.
A joint study was conducted
by IBM and Cisco, wherein the duo analysed the kind of applications
that would be used, bandwidth requirement per user, applications
that students would need to access, and locations to deploy the
access points. The two key applications to be run on the WLAN were
the school’s intranet comprising the school management software,
and ERP system developed by a company called Cross Section Interactive.
The ERP helps the school to manage aspects like teacher-student
records, boarding, dining, transportation, payroll and accounts.
The school Intranet provides a home page for each student and faculty
member. This home page includes a bulletin board, time-table, syllabus,
assignments, lessons, the teacher or student’s personal database,
and a link to library resources. Pathways intends to archive all
workshops and lectures for students to access over the wireless
network.
Deploying a WLAN posed several
potential problems. For instance, there was the threat of students
getting into the teachers’ resource base or accessing unwanted websites.
Security issues, including protection from viruses and worms, have
been taken care of by adopting several measures. The school management
software has a homepage enabling access to different areas. Access
rights vary, and students are restricted to those sections of the
intranet that are relevant to them. A three-layer approach, including
Authentication Authorisation Accounting (AAA) is in use. Like in
most systems of this type, authentication is by means of entering
a user name and password. Based on the rights of that particular
user, he or she can access a specific list of applications and resources.
Information accessed is logged into the accounting server. Says
Anil Chawla, principal consultant at Cisco, "In order to prevent
students from accessing the teachers’ database, Cisco’s WLAN solution
provides for Virtual LANs segregating student and teacher resources."
The 802.1X security standard
has been used. Cisco Wireless Security Suite provides an EAP framework
for user-based authentication. Cisco has developed an 802.1X authentication
type called EAP Cisco Wireless, or Cisco LEAP (Light Extensible
Authentication Protocol). Cisco Aironet products support LEAP and
all 802.1X authentication types, including EAP Transport Layer Security
(EAP-TLS). In addition to this, it has also provided Wired Equivalent
Privacy (WEP) and 128-bit encryption to secure the wireless network.
Firewalls are in place, both
hardware- and software-based. Cisco’s hardware-based firewall prevents
unauthorised intrusion and stops Internet worms. It also blocks
objectionable sites. The software firewall from Cyberoam takes care
of bandwidth management by imposing bandwidth quotas on usage of
the network.
Priority to voice &
video
Real-time applications like
video-on-demand require greater priority than batch applications
like e-mail. Quality of Service (QoS) has been implemented. With
Pathways looking at courses such as craft design technology, which
provide features like real-time engineering and involves downloading
heavy CAD files over the network, this was very much called for.
"This feature ensures that voice and video packets are given preference
as we could not afford to have jittery voice and video considering
the applications that we were looking at," says Jain.
The school server maintains
a broadband connection, giving each student continuous access via
the school intranet to Internet resources. Primus Technologies is
providing Internet bandwidth (128 Kbps, expandable in future) using
a radio link. The school has a radio mast with an antenna that receives
the signal from Primus’ antenna which is connected to a router,
from where it goes to the proxy server and into the WLAN.
With extensive effort having
gone into planning and researching, Jain maintains that Pathways
hasn’t faced significant bottlenecks to date. The wireless network
has today enabled the school to deliver on its promise of ‘anytime,
anywhere’ education.
Click on image for larger view |
| Requirement |
: Campus-wide wireless network
to provide ‘anytime, anywhere’ education |
| Servers |
: 2 |
| Access points |
: 40 |
| Deployment time |
: 3 months |
| Cost |
: Rs 1 crore |
| Users |
: 180 (4x growth anticipated) |
| Options |
: Can migrate to 802.11g
using the existing set-up, and gain 5x bandwidth boost |
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