As a professor interested in information technologies in teaching and learning, I felt great relief when the problem of access to computers seemed to go away in the late 1990s. For several years, my university had considered the need for a requirement that students bring computers to school. All of a sudden, we had around 98% of our students doing just that, and we seemed to be home free.

But the issue of access comes up again with the broadband question: do all students have equal access not just to computers, but to a high-speed connection? Our residential students do, and they still enjoy a narrow majority, but as faculty develop more rich multimedia content we will have to consider all over again the problem of just how students can get to that content. For off-campus students who do not have DSL or cable modem, on-campus general-use labs are one solution–but many of us in academic computing would like to minimize the footprint of those difficult-to-manage facilities. The other solution is ubiquitous portable computing and wireless access, but the U of Mary Wash won’t be there for another couple of years. And what about dial-up? Should we offer that service at all? Should we be an ISP for anyone off-campus?

Another issue lurking here is that our course management system, Blackboard, is not especially hospitable to multimedia content delivery–at least not at the “basic” level we currently purchase.

We’ll face this problem all over again when what currently passes for broadband is eclipsed by the kind of transfer speeds that make the future Internet truly transparent in terms of response time.