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SOURCE: The Chronicle of Higher Education
05.30.2008
A Computer Lab That Students Use But Never See
By: Jeffrey Young
North Carolina State University may never build another computer lab.
Instead the university has installed racks of equipment in windowless rooms where students and professors never go.
The project is called the Virtual Computing Lab, and users enter it remotely, from their own computers in dormitory rooms or libraries. They get all the features they've had in the past, including access to expensive software packages, like 3-D modeling tools and advanced statistical programs, that they need for courses. But now the programs run on powerful computer servers behind the scenes, instead of on desktop PC's. And this lab never closes.
"You bring the lab to the students instead of bringing the students to the lab," says Sarah R. Stein, assistant vice provost for information-technology special projects.
Perhaps more important, the virtual lab doesn't have the limitations of being controlled only by the university's information-technology department. Unlike in physical labs, professors can install anything they want in the virtual laboratory.
Students say they like the convenience. Administrators are happy because the virtual lab is far cheaper to build and maintain than a physical lab. No one has to watch over rooms with rows of PC's.
Officials here also say that the virtual lab could be the beginning in a more fundamental shift, one that could change the way technology staffs on campuses do business. The goal of the virtual-lab approach is to build Web-based tools that professors can control on their own, without having to ask permission from a staff member to add something to a university computer.
"I got tired of telling users what they couldn't do," says Samuel F. Averitt, vice provost for information technology at North Carolina State. "The central-IT guy is about control and ownership. We're trying to get out of that business, and say, Do it however you want to do it."
The approach is catching on. Colleges across North Carolina are adopting the model, and George Mason University is scheduled to open a virtual lab, based on North Carolina State's, next month. George Mason is working with 14 other public colleges to offer the services to those campuses as well.
Replacing a Broken System
Before officials at North Carolina State began setting up the virtual system, about four years ago, computer labs on the campus were known for their glitches. For one thing, professors complained of slow turnaround when they asked for new software to be installed for their courses.
"Faculty would say, 'I've got this new application; can you install it for me?'" says Thomas K. Miller III, vice provost for distance education and learning-technology applications. "And it would take a year."
Students were annoyed because computers would crash so often. The problem was that staff members would load dozens of advanced programs on each machine, often with conflicting components.
Student labs were just one pressing issue facing the technology staff. The legislature had recently cut support for the state's supercomputer center, which shut down in 2003 as a result. The university had been the facility's biggest user, and campus officials were left scrambling to provide advanced researchers with the processing power needed to keep their experiments going.
"We were headed toward a crisis point," says Mr. Averitt.
The university suddenly needed to build high-end facilities for researchers and to update public computer labs for students. But it couldn't afford to do both, at least not the old-fashioned way.
That's when the idea for the virtual computer lab — one bank of servers that could meet both needs — was born. North Carolina State, which won a $2.4-million grant from Intel Corporation and a $1.2-million grant from IBM to support the approach, has refined and expanded the concept since the lab opened, in 2004.
The resulting upgrade to the university's data centers has allowed researchers to log on to clusters of servers that act as a virtual supercomputer, as is done at many colleges.
But the most innovative aspect is that students got access to the servers as well.
Computing Everywhere
The university has no plans to shut down its old-fashioned computer labs, and officials insist that students will always need public computers to gather around for group projects or to use if they do not have computers of their own. But officials hope that they can stop building traditional computer labs from now on, even as the student body grows.
"What we have done already is not open a new one over the past three years, even though our enrollment has increased," says Henry E. Schaffer, coordinator of special IT projects and faculty collaboration.
The virtual lab has some drawbacks. When users first log in and choose the software application they want to use, the system can take 10 to 15 minutes to set up (although students or professors can make reservations so that their software is ready at a set time). And students need to use a broadband Internet connection; dial-up is too slow to support the service. But officials say that most students have high-speed connections these days and that any minor delays are still less disruptive than having to drive to the campus or walk to a physical lab.
The result is that students spend more time using specialized applications than they used to, says Michael Rappa, director of the university's Institute for Advanced Analytics. That can help when it comes time to apply for a job. "Employers in this sphere want to hire people who have exposure to the complex tools that businesses use," he says.
On a recent day in one of the university's busiest computer labs, located in the main library, several students said they liked the mix of on-campus and off-campus computing choices.
"Most of the time I work from my home or in the library," said Morgan Evans, a sophomore who was getting software for a calculus course. "It was convenient, but sort of slow."
At George Mason, the executive director of instructional technology, Sharon P. Pitt, says the university is adopting the model in partnership with universities across Virginia, using software developed by North Carolina State.
The approach is consistent with the way the Web as a whole is changing, she says, as companies like Amazon and Google offer more Web-based services run from a distant server rather than a user's hard drive.
"These days," she says, "it's not as much about the physical facility as it is about the virtual facility."
