A wireless pioneer

Pathways World School has deployed a wireless network

Pathways World School, an international school situated off Gurgaon-Sohna road near Delhi, has used wireless technology to create an educational system that radically differs from the traditional Indian model. It has deployed a campus-wide wireless local area network (WLAN) across a 30-acre campus with around 40 access points.

Making education a joy

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. Students can sit anywhere 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.
Pathways picked up the concept of a 'notebook cart' that has 10-30 wireless notebooks moving to the classrooms. Currently there are 150 notebook users .The project kicked off in October 2002, and was completed in three months at a cost of around Rs 1 crore.

Wireless to the rescue

For the WLAN solution, the school zeroed in on Cisco. The Cisco WLAN solution at Pathways comprises Cisco Aironet 1200 Series access points, Gigabit LAN switches for the backbone network, and firewall security. Right now Pathways is using the popular 802.11b standard, with access speeds of up to 11 Mbps. IBM did the implementation, and provided servers and wireless-enabled ThinkPad's. 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.

Virtual LANs

The two key applications to be run on the WLAN were the school's intranet comprising the school management software, and ERP system.
Deploying a WLAN posed several potential problems. 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. Like in most systems of this type, authentication is by means of entering a user name and password. 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."

Education anywhere, anytime

Quality of Service (QoS) has been implemented as 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. 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.
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
Pathways hasn't faced any bottlenecks to date. The wireless network has enabled the school to deliver on its promise of 'anytime, anywhere' education.