AOC Oost becomes seamlessly wireless thanks to 3Com
The Challenge
Creating the paperless office has been a noble promise for some twenty years already. But it has only taken the intermediate vocational school AOC Oost a short time to put its own courses completely online. So, no more textbooks and no more cables either, as 3Com is supporting this e-learning environment with a powerful wireless network.
AOC Oost is the main educational and careers centre for eastern Netherlands, with well over 5,000 students and 500 staff. This school offers lower and intermediate vocational courses run across sites in Almelo, Enschede, Borculo, Doetinchem and Twello. The school’s management and central services are based in Lochem. The school’s intermediate vocational sites are equipped with a wireless network, which forms the basis for a total e-learning environment.
This new learning environment is the logical outcome of a strategic choice in favour of time- and place-independent learning. “ICT plays a crucial role in supporting our educational concept,” explains Henk Vermeulen, head of ICT at AOC Oost. “The school’s management decided a few years ago to opt for a skills-orientated educational model where students have access to information and learning resources all the time, from anywhere. From a practical viewpoint, this choice meant that everyone, both students and teachers, had to start using laptops, whether at home or school, and that communication in the school environment had to be based on a wireless model.”
With the aim of testing the feasibility of these plans, AOC Oost first ran a pilot involving 150 users distributed across five sites. They all received laptops which had a wireless infrastructure set up on them. The pilot seemed to go surprisingly well, both from a technical and educational perspective. “The key change was that books were no longer used at all,” continues Henk Vermeulen. “This meant that a different way of working had to be adopted, but both students and teachers coped with this well. The results were so good that the school’s management decided to expand the introduction of this scheme so that all intermediate vocational courses would be offered entirely online.”
Why 3Com?
When it came to choosing the right network infrastructure, Vermeulen and his team looked at solutions from various suppliers, with 3Com’s solution emerging as the most suitable. “3Com put forward a very strong value proposal,” says Henk Vermeulen. “Its value for money in terms of performance is excellent, the hardware is reliable and it’s easy to install and manage. Also, we already had good experiences with our fixed 3Com network and choosing this option offered us the chance to manage everything via a single package and have a single maintenance contract.” There is now a total of some 200 access points installed, which provide complete coverage for every building on every site.
A 3Com WX2200 wireless LAN controller is installed at every site to support the connectivity between laptops and access points on the one hand, and communication with the fixed network on the other. The fixed network is based on redundant stackable 3Com Switches 5500G-EI, while the sites are connected via their own fibre optic cables.
The network’s performance is excellent, in Vermeulen’s opinion, especially when you consider the volume of traffic that needs to be processed wirelessly. “Internet traffic devours a large part of the bandwidth. But there’s more to think about than just email and surfing the net, as all the educational applications are being offered via the Internet too.” Video streaming is also putting a strain on the network. However, Vermeulen says, “Our 3Com wireless network offers a good enough performance to stream YouTube video clips on 10 or 20 laptops at the same time.It’s going really well, also because we have installed several access points at busy sites.”
The 3Com Solution
- 3Com Managed Access Points 2750 and 3750
- 3Com WX2200 and WX1200 Wireless LAN Controllers
- 3Com Switch 5500G EI
- 3Com Network Director management software
Simple to manage and protect
LiveLink provides the foundation for the e-learning environment. This is a document management system which is hosted by the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality and is specially geared towards agricultural training. “LiveLink includes nearly everything that the students need,” explains Vermeulen. “They can submit general work and homework via LiveLink and they can also do tests online. The teachers also correct and assess the students’ work via LiveLink.”
LiveLink is accessible via a portal that includes learning applications which are offered via the Internet. An ever-increasing number of educational publishers are replacing printed books with web-based applications, which means that the school itself does not need to invest in servers and storage systems for educational purposes. This not only saves the school money, but it also removes the need for the IT department to apply a strict security policy. As Henk Vermeulen explains: “The student network is completely Internet-based and is kept strictly separate from the protected school network used by teachers and other staff. As a result, students don’t need to access the school network. This makes the solution accessible and easy to manage.”
Ready for new Wi-Fi standard
In 2010 the last students in the intermediate vocational section who are still using books will leave the school. This means that the intermediate vocational section, comprising some 2,500 students and staff, will be totally online. Another few access points will have been installed by that time. They will probably be products that support the new Wi-Fi standard, 802.11n. Vermeulen concludes: “3Com already has a number of wireless products that are ready to support 802.11n, including new access points which will offer higher throughput speeds and better reception. These new access points will keep our network up to date for years to come.”
