strategies for providing students and researchers...

Strategies for Providing Students and Researchers in Developing Environments Access to Industry Standard

Hardware and Software Technologiesby

Madhav SrimadhSubmitted to the System Design and Management Programin Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Science in Engineering and Management

at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology

June 2003

© 2003 Madhav SrimadhAll rights reserved

The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and todistribute publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part.

Signature of AuthorMadhav Srimadh

System Design and Management ProgramJune 2003

Certified by Amar Gupta

Thesis SupervisorCo-Director, PROductivity From Information Technology

Accepted bySteven D. Eppinger

Co-Director, LFM/SDMGM LFM Professor of Management Science and Engineering Systems

Accepted byPaul A. Lagace

Co-Director, LFM/SDM Professor of Aeronautics & Astronautics and Engineering Systems

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Executive Summary

Problem Statement

The author believes that students learn best when they practice the concepts learnt in the classroom through experiments and hands-on exercises. However, in many developing environments and some rural areas of developed environments, the academic institutions are simply unable to provide industry standard laboratories to their students. There are several factors contributing to this inability. First, given the strength of the local economies and weak policies surrounding indigenous manufacturing infrastructure, acquiring these technologies is an extremely expensive endeavor. Second, many of these improved technologies are not easily available. There are several factors contributing to this issue, namely, the markets in these environments are still evolving, companies do not see the economies of scale to establish units locally to supply the demand. Third, the technology is changing rapidly; it is practically impossible for educational institutions to keep pace with it for the reasons stated. And finally, there is a lack of awareness among these institutions as to what technologies exist outside their realm and how they can be acquired for the benefit of their students.

Despite years of extensive efforts in tackling the digital divide issue, organizations and initiatives have fallen short of delivering the benefits of IT to these developing environments. To assist the academic institutions in providing industry standard technologies, a framework for assessing the current solutions, identifying unresolved technical and business challenges and evaluating potential technological alternatives is needed. To develop this framework, the interdependencies among three key sub-systems academia, industry and government, in conjunction with the availability of low-cost technology alternatives must be explored.

Originality Requirement

The thesis describes a novel approach to develop a framework that applies learning from the MIT System Design and Management program to the analysis of the digital divide issue in academic settings in developing environments. An original examination of the existing initiatives addressing the issue is presented along with the exposition of major challenges that need to be further addressed to bridge the digital divide. A framework around information and communication technologies is presented along with the synergies needed among academia, industry and government.

In order to obtain tangible conclusions and provide concrete recommendations, the thesis applies the developed framework to India, which is a developing country, recognized as low-cost, high quality producer of information technology related products and services.

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Content and Conclusions

This thesis approaches digital divide in the academic settings as a systemic issue in the developing environments. Prior work addressing the issue assumes that the problem can be tackled at an element level, through technology donations or by establishing state-of-the-art laboratories in a few select institutions, without understanding the principle dynamics at the sub-system and system levels. As a result low-cost alternatives which are optimized at an element level and which cannot be easily scaled have been developed. In general, helping academic institutions to keep pace with the clock-speed of information technologies and assisting the decision makers with the necessary understanding of interdependencies in the system are not addressed. The initial chapters of the thesis define the digital divide in academic settings in developing environments, explore and analyze the existing solutions and attempt to characterize the major challenges that are still unresolved. The middle chapters describe the methodology and approach taken to develop the framework and present a discussion on the systems approach to the problem. The final chapters apply the systems framework developed to an academic setting in India and discuss strategic implications and recommendations for overcoming the inherent tensions between quality and cost of education.

One of the primary conclusions from this research is that the supporting infrastructure and the policies surrounding indigenous software and hardware component manufacturing industries is a key ingredient in solving the digital divide problem. The recommendations address the roles of industry and government on how best to develop communication technologies and better equipped laboratories that strengthen the supportive infrastructure for academic institutions. In addition, important decision variables including the cost of education, initiatives for global technology awareness, use of low-cost technology alternatives, policies and direction for electronic component manufacturing industry and a common vision and partnership amongst academia, industry and government have been identified as the key building blocks for addressing the digital divide problem. Many of the issues in indigenous technology development can be overcome by employing system architecture principles to modularize and create products based on vertical product architectures which will facilitate easy adoption to the IT clock-speed. The proposed technology framework follows a modular architecture with open-standard programming interfaces. System engineering principles aid in defining the sub-system interfaces at various levels in a clear and terse manner. These principles are combined in a unique manner to develop a framework that simplifies the process of providing industry standard laboratories to students and researchers. This change in strategy calls for some inevitable cultural and systemic changes to the education delivery process and organizations in the academia.

Furthermore, this thesis demonstrates how existing approaches fall short of successfully addressing the technology gap issue due to their element level approach and presents a discussion on the implications thereof. In addition, it reiterates that equipping educational institutions with industry standard laboratories and training the students in the state-of-

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the-art methods are imperative to the developing environment’s future successes in the information technology industry.System Design and Management Principles

The thesis draws upon a combination of SDM principles to achieve its objectives. Fundamental concepts from system architecture, system engineering, system dynamics, organizational processes, technology strategy and advanced software engineering are brought together to provide a comprehensive analysis of the issues surrounding existing approaches to solve the digital divide problem. In closely examining issues around the digital divide in academic institutions, important aspects such as weak component industry and manufacturing infrastructure, high-cost of technology imports, and lack of proper communication infrastructure are uncovered. The thesis examines a number of real-world implementations of industry-academia-government partnerships and draws lessons from these initiatives that have been incorporated into the proposed framework. A holistic systems perspective is required to understand the linkages between industry, academia and government and is adopted. Fundamental aspects of the academia-industry-government value chain are explored to identify these linkages and a framework that is an amalgamation of SDM principles, advanced technologies and key research findings is developed to aid decision makers in systematically approaching the digital divide problem.

In particular, knowledge gained from system dynamics and systems architecture courses, both of which advocate holistic thinking, was particularly valuable in these regards. The technology framework developed in the thesis extensively uses system architecture principles including identifying end users and their needs, defining product goals, analyzing the classic tension between cost and quality of education in designing a system that is modular, meets the low-cost requirement, provides industry standard software and hardware technologies to students through shared computational resource model and is extensible with small additional costs. System dynamics was employed to gain preliminary insight into the behavior patterns of sharing computational resources among partner institutions. Advanced software engineering principles are utilized to develop the design of the software system with object orientation, data abstraction and platform and protocol independence through the use of XML and other standards based technologies. Marketing strategy course provides valuable tools such as customer profiling, in this case, students’ computational and communication needs, to prepare taxonomy of technology in education. Financial and managerial accounting coursework assisted in developing a basic cost model for the proposed technology solution. A comparative cost-benefit analysis is presented that emphasizes the scalability, flexibility and affordability of the proposed technology framework.

Engineering and Management Content

By combining concepts from engineering and business, this thesis attempts to create a holistic view of challenges facing the academic institutions in developing environments with respect to acquiring and integrating industry standard software and hardware

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technologies into the curriculum. Engineering content includes technical review and analysis of initiatives addressing the digital divide issue and a comprehensive description of a proposed framework for deploying state-of-the-art mobile laboratories that leverage simplicity and affordability of wireless in local loop technologies. The author’s development experience in the field of telecommunications and wireless technologies provides unique insights into the challenges faced by indigenous software and hardware development industries. The proposed approach evaluates a fairly low-cost wireless enabled mobile laboratory, based on industry knowledge and technology trends, which would provide state-of-the-art hardware and software technologies to students and researchers in academic institutions in developing environments. Furthermore, it evaluates a resource-sharing model, based on grid computing, and describes a new grid service for enabling resource sharing among partner academic institutions.

Management content includes a characterization of the chasm that is created in the developing environments in adopting breakthrough technologies, an analysis of factors exogenous to the academic settings such as industry recruitment, training costs and cost of education and a note on the existing barriers to organizational change.

The thesis goes beyond design analysis “in the small” by taking a fresh look at how academic institutions need to change the way they approach the issue of providing industry standard software and hardware laboratories and recommends taking a big picture approach to gain better understanding of the issue and its implications. The creation of supporting infrastructure, policies and products for local markets is a daunting task that is rarely easy to accomplish but its benefits are enormous.

Statement of Authorship and Originality

The work performed to write this thesis is the author’s and is original.

Thesis Supervisor: Amar GuptaTitle: Co-director, PROductivity from Information Technology (PROFIT)

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Dedicated to my parents...

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Acknowledgments

I dedicate this thesis work in memory of my parents, Prof. S.B.Raghunathacharya and. S.B. Vijayalakshmi and my late grandfather Sri. S.B.L. Narasimhacharya. My father inspired me with his perseverance and integrity; my mother instilled in me aspirations to engender positive change and my grandfather showed me that knowledge is an ocean and learning should never stop. I am greatly indebted to them for all that they have given me. Today, I proudly carry their torch. If they were alive, I know that their joy would have had no bounds, and that they would have reflected on their son’s accomplishments with pride.

I thank the System Design and Management (SDM) program for believing in me and challenging my abilities at every level. I would like to extend my appreciation to Dennis Mahoney, Director of SDM program and Ted Hoppe for their help and kind words during times of distress. I have enjoyed the journey through this program and feel fortunate to have made friends with some of the brightest minds among my classmates.

I would like to sincerely thank my advisor Dr. Amar Gupta who constantly challenged me to raise the bar, guided me, kept my focus and was always available to exchange ideas that helped formulate this thesis. I am grateful to my manager at Nortel Networks, Franco Travostino and my project leader Inder Monga for their help throughout the program.

I like to also thank our friends Prashanth, Nagashree, Anjali, Sridhar, Srikanth, Vani, Srinadh, Padmaja and Geetika, for their support and for still continuing to be friends with us!

Above all, I offer my love and gratitude to my wife Kiran and daughter Raaga Manjusha, I would not have dared to take on this wonderful adventure if not for their immense love and sacrifice.

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Contents

List of Figures..................................................................................................11

List of Tables....................................................................................................12

Chapter I: Introduction and Overview..............................131.1 Introduction..............................................................................................................131.2 Academic Settings in Developing Environments....................................................17

1.2.1 Academic Culture and Change Management...................................................181.3 Thesis Outline..........................................................................................................19

1.3.1 Tactical and Strategic Objectives.....................................................................191.3.2 Project Considerations......................................................................................201.3.3 Thesis Organization..........................................................................................20

Chapter II: Project Objectives and Background. . .222.1 Providing Industry-standard Technologies to Students in Developing Environments.......................................................................................................................................22

2.1.1 Problem Statement............................................................................................222.1.2 Tactical Objectives...........................................................................................232.1.3 Strategic Objectives..........................................................................................24

2.2 Academic Environment...........................................................................................242.3 Drivers for Growth in Educational Technology......................................................252.4 Bringing Industry-standard Laboratories Inside......................................................252.5 Metrics.....................................................................................................................26

2.5.1 Technology Spending in Education..................................................................262.5.2 Cost per Student................................................................................................262.5.3 Targeted Education Spending...........................................................................27

2.6 Problem Scope.........................................................................................................27

Chapter III: Methodology and Approach......................283.1 Overview of the Proposed Framework....................................................................28

3.2 Discovery Process................................................................................................303.2.1 Market Research...............................................................................................303.2.2 Stakeholder Needs Analysis.............................................................................313.2.3 Taxonomy of Technology in Education...........................................................31

3.3 Benchmarking..........................................................................................................333.3.1 Simputer............................................................................................................333.3.2 Thin-client Thick-server Paradigm...................................................................343.3.3 Infothela............................................................................................................353.3.4 Digital Gangetic Plain.......................................................................................35

3.4 Relevant Literature Search......................................................................................353.4.1 High clock-speed..............................................................................................353.4.2 Technology TCO..............................................................................................363.4.3 Technology Unavailability...............................................................................373.4.4 Impediments to Innovation Adoption...............................................................37

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3.5 Populating the Academia-Industry Partnership Model............................................383.5.1 Student Enrollment...........................................................................................383.5.2 Research Budget...............................................................................................393.5.3 Institution’s Innovation and Intellectual Property............................................393.5.4 Institutions’ Reputation....................................................................................393.5.5 Research Grants................................................................................................403.5.6 Academia-Industry-Government Value Chain.................................................403.5.7 Recruiting.........................................................................................................41

Chapter IV: Systems Approach to the Solution......424.1 Real-world Implementation of System Engineered Solutions.................................42

4.1.1 Leveraging Computer and Television Assets in Brazil to Deliver Educational Content.......................................................................................................................424.1.2 Media Lab Asia.................................................................................................43

4.2 Systems Thinking....................................................................................................454.3 Proposed Technology Framework...........................................................................46

4.3.1 Internet Technologies.......................................................................................484.3.2 Wireless Technologies......................................................................................484.3.3 Grid Computing................................................................................................494.3.4 Mobile Wireless Enabled Laboratories............................................................514.3.5 Architecture Design for a Grid Service Running in Mobile Laboratory..........564.3.6 Point-to-Point Shared Online Laboratories......................................................644.4.1 System Dynamics Model..................................................................................664.4.2 Sensitivity Analysis..........................................................................................684.4.3 Simulation Results and Discussion...................................................................724.4.4 Emergent Dysfunctional Properties..................................................................72

4.5 Proposed Business Framework................................................................................724.6 Bringing the Framework Together..........................................................................73

Chapter V: Applying the Framework to India.........745.1 Overview: Three Environments...............................................................................755.2 Technology in Education.........................................................................................775.3 IT Outsourcing in the Perspective...........................................................................815.4 Strategic Direction for Indian Technology Industry................................................825.5 Application of the Framework.................................................................................83

5.5.1 Education and Research Network, India..........................................................835.5.2 Use case scenario for cost comparison.............................................................845.5.3 Wireless Enabled Mobile Laboratory Service..................................................86

Chapter VI: Strategic Recommendations and Conclusions.........................................................................................................88

6.1 Grid Computing.......................................................................................................886.2 Wireless Last-Mile Connectivity.............................................................................886.3 Understanding the Nature of the Technology Gap..................................................896.4 Sources of Digital Divide........................................................................................896.5 Readdressing Roles of Academia and Industry.......................................................89

6.5.1 Rule of 10s and Concurrent Training...............................................................90

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6.6 Reevaluating Technology Gap in Developing Environments.................................906.6.1 Industry in the value chain................................................................................906.6.2 Process Improvement........................................................................................916.6.3 Enterprise Approach to Technology Gap.........................................................916.6.4 Metrics..............................................................................................................91

6.7 Academic Institutions in IT Centric Economies......................................................926.8 Conclusions..............................................................................................................92

Appendix A: Terminology.................................................................95

Appendix B.........................................................................................................98

Bibliography....................................................................................................100

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List of Figures

Figure 1-1: Technology Diffusion in Educational Institutions....................................17Figure 3-1: Clock-speed of the Electronic Chip Industry..................................................36Figure 3-2: Academia-Industry-Government Value Chain...............................................41Figure 4-1: Upstream and Downstream Influences in Architecting a System..................45Figure 4-2: Circles of Complementary Enabling Technologies........................................48Figure 4-3: High-level Grid Architecture and Functional Blocks.....................................50Figure 4-4: Prototype Architecture for a Wireless Enabled Mobile Laboratory...............54Figure 4-5: State-of-the-art Mobile Laboratory.................................................................56Figure 4-6: Lab Service System Model using Grid Infrastructure....................................57Figure 4-7: XLab Grid Service Policy Interactions...........................................................60Figure 4-8: Protocol for the XLab Service Application to use Grid Services...................63Figure 4-9: MIT’s Shared Online Laboratories, WebLab 4.0 Architecture......................65Figure 4-10: Reference Modes for the Proposed System Framework...............................67Figure 4-11: Technology Sharing Among Participating Institutions Model.....................68Figure 4-12: Perceived Quality of Education....................................................................69Figure 4-13: Actual Technology Sharing..........................................................................69Figure 4-14: Cost of Education with respect to technology spending...............................70Figure 4-15: Effect of perceived quality on technology upgrade pressure........................71Figure 4-16: Business Aspects of the Proposed Systems Framework...............................73Figure 5-1: Indian Education System with Thesis Focus Segments Highlighted.............76Figure 5-2: PC Penetration into Educational Institutions in India.....................................77Figure 5-3: Internet Growth in India.................................................................................78Figure 5-4: The Cost of Network Infrastructure in India..................................................79Figure 5-5: Evolution of Offshore IT Outsource Model and its Impact on Value Creation

...................................................................................................................................82Figure 5-6: Education and Research Network, India.........................................................84


List of Tables

Table 3-1: Taxonomy for Different Technologies in Education Based on Their Needs...33Table 3-2: Technology Infrastructure in a Developing Environment...............................38Table 5-1: PC Penetration into Educational Institutions...................................................78Table 5-2: Internet Growth in a Developing Environment................................................78Table 5-3: Approximate Cost of Technology Infrastructure Installation..........................85Table 5-4: Costs of Deploying a Wireless Enabled Mobile Laboratory...........................86Table A-1: Terminology....................................................................................................97Table B-1: Indian Software Industry Growth (Source: NASSCOM)................................98Table B-2: Shared Technologies System Dynamics Model Equations.............................98


Chapter I: Introduction and Overview

This section describes a classic digital divide issue between the technology haves and the

have-nots in the academic setting. The issue concerns the inability of academic

institutions in developing environments to keep up with the high acquisition and

ownership costs, and rapidly changing industry standard software and hardware

technologies to create the best-in-class learning experience for their students and

researchers. This thesis, attempts to provide a framework to demonstrate how academic

institutions in developing environments could leverage emerging technologies to mitigate

the digital divide; in particular the notion of grid computing and wireless connectivity in

the last mile are explored as unifying force between developing and developed

environments. The framework developed encompasses a discussion around the enabling

technologies. Furthermore, it recognizes the importance of a systems perspective of the

digital divide issue; it addresses the organizational and business issues surrounding the

digital divide problem.

1.1 Introduction

Digital divide is an age-old technology and management topic. Nonetheless, it remains

elusive to organizations that attempt to mitigate it. Digital divide issue in education can

be approached in many different fronts. Some of the previous approaches taken are in the

areas of providing technology and infrastructure donations, establishing funds and

organizations to aid technology adoption, promoting local inexpensive technology

alternatives, conducting educational seminars, games and conferences and enabling

strong interconnections among local and global centers of excellence. The author believes

that approaching the problem in any one front will not solve the problem at hand. Taking

a system of systems perspective is important to successfully address an issue faced by

over two-thirds of the world’s academic population. Specific initiatives, their pros and

cons, are listed in Table 1-1.


Category Initiative Pros/Comments Cons/Recommendations

Technology and Infrastructure Donations

Reuters Foundation, Stanford University [35]

Initiative to bring together academic, corporate and NGO sectors. It gives technology experts an opportunity to come to Stanford campus and apply their vision and talent to address the challenges faced by developing environments.

The project rightly recognizes Governmental assistance in setting the right policies; but, it doesn’t involve any government representatives or enforce policy change.

Good set of corporate sponsors including Microsoft, Cisco, HP, Philips and others.

Little local industry involvement.

Moderate number of projects ranging from strengthening financial infrastructure and e-commerce in India to Satellite imagery and GIS data for agriculture.

None of the current projects is looking into improving education or enabling technologies.

Computer Aid International [40]

The world’s largest non-profit supplier of computers to developing environments. Support from the government and industry.

Computers donated are older versions. No application software support.

Focused on the high-schools.

Not directly affecting the engineering education arena.

Training in computer repair and usage to people from developing environments.

Funds and organizations

Media Lab [41] Programmable Lego bricks and MPEG video encoding standard are two successful endeavors in 25 year history of Media Lab.

One of the three planned divisions which was supposed to be education (edevelopment) is still-born. It has not materialized.


Support from MIT and local governments in terms of funds, domain experts, research, students and faculty.

Little impact on the education and technology infrastructure in rural parts of Asia. The government is rethinking their strategy around Media Lab Asia [67].

Thinkcycle.org [26]

Concept is to provide a web medium that will bring together visionaries from around the world to design solutions for real-world problems in developing environments. Good concept.

To date, no significant impact on the targeted communities. No focus, which is good for creativity but very detrimental to achieve anything concrete. Works in the education field are very premature with little or no impact.

IITK BRiCS [42]

Introducing state-of-the-art technology and concepts into high-schools and colleges through games and robotic competitions.

Dependent on importing Lego kits which are very expensive for an average educational institution.

Must find ways to build alternate low-cost robot kits. For example, using wires for gears has proved to be viable. Similarly replacing the Lego programmable brick with low-cost Handyboard [68] may help.

Collaboration between Global Centers of Excellence

American Indian Federation [43]

Innovative partnership model between American and Indian organizations striving for similar goals. Established school for 400 child laborers.

Not scalable unless critical momentum is gained in establishing similar ties. No technology orientation; does not have any impact on the engineering education.

Indigenous TeNeT Group Excellent model that will Working toward


Innovation [3] dramatically impact the way educational institutions acquire technology and the costs of ownership.

government support, must build coalitions with like minded organizations in India as well as abroad.

Proven technology, deployed successfully in India and some African environments.Right approach; it involves the local industries, local talent, local government and has a global reach.

In the near term, building relationship with low cost manufacturers in Taiwan and China may help. In the long term, drive local manufacturing infrastructure, policies and applications.

Table 1-1: Digital Divide Initiatives and their Pros and Cons

As developing environments approach the problem of digital divide more systematically,

they will find the tension between balancing their educational infrastructure through

international aid and assistance with low-cost, highly available local IT providers. The

investment in technology infrastructure for the academic sector is rarely justified by

tangible returns.

Institutions have approached this battle by instilling an innovative culture. The innovative

culture framework includes generating hi-tech solutions to real-world problems and

creating value to the industry, government and the community. This approach has

generated millions of dollars of research grants to select institutions from various sources,

including the government and the industry. It propelled many governments in developing

environments to champion exodus from old-way of doing things into making hi-tech the

center of their universe [44]. Despite the efforts, many recognize the need for a cohesive

framework [31] that addresses how to scale the model to academic institutions in the

developing worlds. In short, how can the academic institutions in developing


environments generate the level of talent required for further strengthening the country’s

foray into Information Technology?

The following sections give an overview of the educational sector and the culture in

developing environments and an overview of thesis, which will provide a framework to

answer the question raised above. Although significant detail on several developing

environments is provided, the thesis focuses on Indian academic setting because the

framework developed will be applied specifically to India to gain concrete insights and

conclusions.

1.2 Academic Settings in Developing Environments

Typically the technology advances have been adopted by the most developed

environments where some of the recent innovations such as the Internet, Wireless and

Grid computing originated.

Figure 1-1: Technology Diffusion in Educational Institutions

The developing environments tend to be part of the delayed adopters (Chasm B) as

shown in the “crossing the chasm” concept [19] in Figure 1-1. Therefore, these

environments have very little impact on how the technology should look (form) or

behave (function) to suit the local cultural, technological and business needs. What would

be beneficial to the developing environments is if they are able to take part in the

development of a new technology as early or lead adopters. This thesis attempts to take


Early Adopters Early Majority Late Majority Laggards

Chasm A

Chasm B

Chasm C

Most Developed Developing Underdeveloped Environments

one step in that direction by proposing to introduce wireless connectivity and Grid

computing to the students and researchers in developing environments. In the next

section, a brief overview of the academic settings in three developing environments is

presented.

1.2.1 Academic Culture and Change Management

The cultural aspects of academia cannot be overlooked if one aspires to bring change into

the way these institutions think and perform. Organizations that have established offices

or developed initiatives in Indian schools recognize the importance of understanding the

local academic culture and accordingly place emphasis on the aspect. For example, in

India the academic environment is very competitive and the method of instruction is

mostly lecture based versus an interactive environment for open dialog and exchange of

ideas. The organization structures are hierarchical and typically seniority leads to career

advancement for the faculty. Research is not on the primary agenda for a typical

academic institution; thereby interaction with the industry and the government practically

does not exist. The lack of interdependence among the government, industry and

academia, except for the purposes of obtaining funds, creates a possible chasm between

these organizations in terms of their understanding of each others culture, vision and

synergy.

The cultural shift must occur in several fronts; first one needs to understand the value of

technology in education; second adapt to the changes in the industry, third, understand

the past, set a common vision and direction; fourth create a sense of urgency; fifth

support a strong leadership role; sixth align the political sponsorship and develop the

implementation plan; and finally create the enabling structures and communicate the

change to involved stakeholders [12]. This thesis takes the aforementioned gated process

steps and proposes a change management strategy in the academic settings to deploy the

developed framework.


1.3 Thesis Outline

This thesis provides an analysis of the digital-divide issue specific to the academic arena.

By addressing the fundamental aspects such as information and communication

infrastructure, better equipped laboratories and industry and government support to

academia, a low-cost mobile laboratories model is developed. The model provides a

framework for discussing the tactical implications of low-cost solutions to provide

industry standard laboratories to students and the role state-of-the-art technologies in

education must play in the future successes of India, its industries and academia.

1.3.1 Tactical and Strategic Objectives

Historically, the majority of educational institutions in developing environments provide

software and hardware technologies that have been acquired very early on when the

laboratories were established. In many of these institutions there is lack of systematic

approach to acquiring newer technologies to keep the students abreast of advancements

[50]. Reasons for not updating to newer state-of-the-art hardware and software

technologies are many as noted in the problem statement.

The thesis attempts to reevaluate the issues and present a framework based on newer

communication technologies and resource sharing alternatives being developed by the

Grid computing community. The Grid computing approach is similar to the fundamental

idea behind an academic institution, which is to share multiple resources in a cohesive

fashion in order to impart knowledge to large numbers of students simultaneously.

In specific, the thesis will develop architecture for a wireless communication

infrastructure to fulfill the last-mile problem that is faced by majority of the educational

institutions in developing environments. In addition to the proposed communication

infrastructure, access to industry standard software and hardware technologies must be

provided. Grid computing infrastructure being developed by the Global Grid Forum [71]

attempts to establish standards around resource sharing, protocols, security and policies

which will enable organizations around the globe to share their computational resources


with other organizations as if the participating entities are all part of a bigger virtual

organization.

This thesis attempts to leverage the Grid infrastructure [72] and proposes a new

laboratory grid service called XLab, an extensible laboratory service, and defines the

architecture, functional and design specifications including functional module

description, internal and external interfaces, and application programming interfaces

(API) needed to implement the service. Furthermore, a cost model of the proposed

solution is developed and a comparison with a traditional solution is presented. At the

organization level, the proposed strategy to combine wireless technologies and grid

computing best leverages the resources among partner institutions to provide low-cost,

state-of-the-art laboratories to their students. Enterprises benefit because they will have

an opportunity for hiring graduates who are proficient in industry standard software and

hardware technologies, which translate into shorter learning curves, higher productivity

and faster product development cycle time.

1.3.2 Project Considerations

This thesis not only leverages the classic literature and earlier work in this field but also

makes an effort to recognize the organizational dynamics and strategic and tactical

implications of the framework. Leadership, academic culture, industry trends, system

dynamics and technology strategy add depth to the discussion and the resulting

framework.

1.3.3 Thesis Organization

First, the thesis takes a closer perspective on the problem, affecting factors and important

metrics, in order to understand the project background and formulate the objectives. In

the methodology and approach section, the approach taken to tackle the issues in a novel

way as well as the methodology used to leverage prior art for coming up with a

framework are discussed. Once the framework has been defined, the section on systems

thinking presents the possible dynamics in a system where the shared resources model in

academia is analyzed.


In Chapter 5, the framework is applied to the Indian academic environment.

Recommendations and strategic results section discusses how the framework attempts to

bring industry standard technologies to students in the developing world and its

implications on the students, institutions and the industry. The conclusions section

highlights lessons learned from the context of academic institutions in India and key

findings. There are a number of acronyms and technical terms used throughout the

document which are documented in Appendix A; related material is documented in

Appendix B.


Chapter II: Project Objectives and Background

An SDM thesis must satisfy many requirements, one of the most important one being a

balanced approach between engineering and management aspects and addressing them

with a clear systems thinking in perspective. The thesis framework and objectives

recognize the importance of systems thinking and ensure that the issues are approached

bearing a holistic view in perspective.

2.1 Providing Industry-standard Technologies to Students in Developing Environments

A number of global organizations have taken measures to provide better educational

facilities to kinder garden, primary and middle school level students. For example, the

World Bank [14] initiated District Primary Education Program (DPEP) and Higher

Education Projects [29] in India in the 1990s to help provide children ages 6 to 14 to get

quality primary education. So far it has reached 60 million children and cost US $1.2

billion. Non-profits like Jiva [24], Digital Dividend [15] have taken a different approach

for providing state-of-the-art education skills through the establishment of local

community centers. Media Lab Asia [39] aspires to help provide cheap, reliable,

innovative computing to the rural areas of environments such as India. However, very

little has been done to provide adequate Internet facilities and reliable experimental tools

to students of engineering education. The main objective of the thesis is to enable

engineering colleges with communication and computational infrastructure at an

affordable cost.

2.1.1 Problem Statement

The author believes that students learn best when they practice the concepts learnt in the

classroom through experiments and hands-on exercises. However, in many developing

environments and some rural areas of developed environments, the academic institutions

are simply unable to provide industry standard laboratories to their students. There are

several factors contributing to this inability. First, given the strength of the local


economies and the buying power of the currencies, acquiring these technologies is

extremely expensive. Second, many of these improved technologies are not easily

available. There are several factors contributing to this issue, namely, the markets in

these environments are still evolving and the manufacturing companies do not see the

economies of scale to establish units locally to supply the demand. Further, the

technology is changing rapidly; it is practically impossible for educational institutions to

keep pace with it for the reasons stated. And finally, there is a lack of awareness among

these institutions as to what technologies exist outside their realm and how they can be

acquired for the benefit of their students.

While many potential projects came up during the initial discussions with students and

faculty in developing environments and with the advisor alike, it was quickly evident that

the problem lies at a much deeper level. Although educational institutions in India

recognize the issue of poor laboratory facilities, they are unable to leapfrog to the next

best alternative due to insufficient understanding of the implications of the problem at

hand and lack of the holistic systems view. By understanding the key drivers for the need

to enhance laboratories facilities and for improved communication infrastructure, efforts

can then be best deployed. Using the framework of low cost laboratories model, the

following tactical and strategic objectives are identified.

2.1.2 Tactical Objectives

The problem of digital-divide in general is well understood by many of the developing

environments. For example, in India some states are adapting to e-governance and other

initiatives to bring the benefits of technology to the masses in rural areas. Traditionally,

the digital-divide in the academic setting has been viewed with little attention. It is now

becoming more evident how critical it is to have students exposed to strong engineering

and manufacturing skills for the future success of the country. The following barriers to

creating industry standard technologies locally have been identified [5].

Weak ties between the research wings and the industry

Very disorganized and poor electronic component industry


Non-aligned incentives for indigenous manufacturers to work with local

companies

Weak policy around the hardware design and manufacturing industry

All of the above factors affect the local educational institutions’ ability to acquire

industry standard technologies. A closer look at the technologies deployed in most of the

institutions today for internet connectivity reveals that they are not only expensive and

inefficient but they are not scalable too.

2.1.3 Strategic Objectives

Once the tactical objectives have been addressed, it becomes important to understand

what it takes to implement a system based on the framework in a real-world. There are

various aspects to be given serious consideration.

Who will implement the service, to whom will the services be provided and who will pay

for the services?

How should the educational institution approach the total cost of ownership issue?

How indigenous companies are encouraged and their products are leveraged?

What are the policies that will govern the successful working of the proposed system?

The following sections detail other exogenous variables that affect the thesis objectives

and influence the results of the framework including the academic environment, drivers

for growth of technology in education, industry partnership and key metrics.

2.2 Academic Environment

Indian education has traditionally been weak in imparting hands-on engineering

education while extremely strong on other aspects. The government has taken steps in the

recent years to strengthen the hardware industry; however, there seems to be a lack of

consistency and commitment in the government policy [52]. There is a strong need for

improving the engineering and manufacturing [51] facilities to jump-start local market

for indigenous software and hardware products.


2.3 Drivers for Growth in Educational Technology

Technology has become an inherent part of the educational systems in the developed

environments. The use of computers and communication technologies in the classroom

and on campus is taken for granted in majority of these environments. However,

developing environments are facing a challenge in providing software and hardware

technologies to their local academic institutions. The application of these technologies in

daily coursework, classroom or on campus is still a distant future for these institutions for

the reasons noted in the earlier sections.

There is a steadily growing demand for graduates with expertise in hi-tech methods and

tools. In the US, 6 out every 10 people have computers and 1 out of every 2 persons uses

the Internet [69]. The situation is different in developing environments; for example, in

India 1 in 1000 students has access to computers and 7 in 1000 people use Internet [25].

There is a great upside potential for technology growth in the academic settings in India

given the above statistics. Besides, the effects of globalization, increasing investments by

multinational corporations and affordable alternate technologies such as wireless, all help

boost the need for a strong technology infrastructure in educational institutions within

developing environments.

2.4 Bringing Industry-standard Laboratories Inside

We noted how critical it is for developing environments to invest in educational

technologies in the classroom to better serve the demand for technology oriented

employment opportunities being generated and the need for building skills in the

engineering and manufacturing of complex systems. Several of the top engineering

colleges in India have established strong ties with industry leaders such as Intel and HP

which setup sophisticated microprocessor and other electronic component fabrication

laboratories on campus. Needless to say, this model needs to be scaled further to build

out a human capital base of qualified electronic fabrication, design and manufacturing

expertise. Industry needs to partner and work closely with the academia to provide the


right infrastructure and environment for the students to gain knowledge and expertise in

the desired fields.

2.5 Metrics

Several important metrics must be considered to make the case for using industry

standard technologies in an academic institution, and the benefits to its students, to the

institution and to the industry. This section describes three important metrics that need to

be carefully studied to clearly understand the benefits these educational technologies

bring, the costs involved, and how and where to target the limited resources that an

institution has at its disposal.

2.5.1 Technology Spending in Education

Technology spending in many educational institutions in developing environments is a

small percentage of the overall education budget. For example, when compared to a mid-

tier academic institution in the US, a peer institution in the developing environments will

stand a distant chance of competing on the basis of technology infrastructure. Over the

years, the costs of technology ownership have come down significantly and many schools

in the US have benefited directly as a result of this trend, however, these same trends

have not translated into any significant benefits to institutes of higher learning in

developing environments. There is a need for taking a fresh approach to this issue,

software and hardware industries in these environments have to be strengthened and

encouraged to innovate for the local markets.

2.5.2 Cost per Student

The Indian educational system employs a low cost structure which makes it affordable

for students; Cost of education has been rising steadily, in the early 1990s the average

tuition and fee was roughly US $50-$75 per student per year while in the US the average

cost per student per year during the same time was US $15,000 [72].

The supporting infrastructure for student loans, scholarships, assistantships and other

fellowships helps the students in the US cover their educational expenses. In the


developing environments, the supporting infrastructure is weak. Since the education costs

are not very high, the banks and other lenders are not attracted to invest in such programs

and credit tracking and rating systems are not in place as well. The governments are

unable to help the students as much because of lack of funds in addition to the prior

stated reasons.

2.5.3 Targeted Education Spending

Academic institutions need to be targeted towards where and how they spend their

limited resources. In many cases it may be appropriate to expend resources in acquiring

tools, technologies and skill-set in the high-growth industries where there will be a

substantial return on their investment in terms of student satisfaction, employment

opportunities for their students, obtaining research grants and so on.

2.6 Problem Scope

What is lacking in many of the alternative solutions addressing the technology gap in

developing environments is that, the solutions do not address the fact that technology is

changing rapidly and the costs of ownership of new technologies to the academic

institutions is extremely straining on their budgets. This thesis research focuses on

bringing the state-of-the-art software and hardware systems to students through the use of

three complementary technologies.

1. Internet related technologies and Virtual Private Networking

2. Wireless Networks and,

3. Grid Computing

A cost model is developed around the proposed design and is compared with an alternate

existing solution.


Chapter III: Methodology and Approach

The methodology and approach to address the tactical and strategic goals can be

categorized broadly into six phases. Phase I involves the discovery process of

technologies in use today in developing environments’ educational systems which

includes market research and identifying stakeholder needs and developing a taxonomy

of the communication and information infrastructure. Phase II develops an understanding

of the current models and their approach to the issue and perform relevant literature

search and analysis. Phase III populates the Industry-Academia partnership model by

taking a deeper look into some key variables such as student enrollment, student

satisfaction, research budget and so on. Phase IV takes a systems approach to devise a

solution framework, Phase V applies the framework developed to Indian academic setting

and the final phase discusses the strategic and tactical implications and conclusions from

the framework.

3.1 Overview of the Proposed Framework

In systems composed of many interacting feedback loops and long time delays, the cause

of an observed symptom may come from an entirely different part of the system and lie

far back in time [22]. It is important to understand the system in which educational

institutions operate and the different sets of feedback loops to understand the issues at

hand. The framework developed in this thesis takes a systems approach to the problem. It

looks at Industry, Academia and Government as three sub-systems and how their

interdependent roles affect the educational system. The thesis takes a look at the existing

synergies among the three sub-systems from a developing country perspective and

evaluates a new model in which the sub-systems behave as interdependent entities that

recognize the feedback loops. Some environments have demonstrated how the three sub-

systems must operate to successfully leverage the synergies. For example, in Japan,

government, industry and academia have collaborated on several projects in the past [83].

Together they are working to increase productivity, foster the growth of new business and

lay a firm foundation for the resumption of healthy economic growth [82] through a


collaborative effort that includes some of the large private sector members including

Toshiba, NTT DoCoMo, Canon and University of Tokyo. A few of the key

recommendations from the commission are to encourage government to reduce the

depreciation periods for high-tech equipment, increase tax credits for R&D investments,

increase spending on basic research activities, set minimum level of regulations necessary

for competitors to enter and establish their businesses and promote innovation and

entrepreneurship.

On the similar lines, by 1997 the academia-industry partnerships had resulted in 2362

joint research programs up from a meager 56 projects in 1983; the first two big segments

among these projects are hardware (307) and software (221). There are several problems

with the joint research programs. First, all the funds have traditionally come from the

private sector, but this is changing to a model where the academic institution matches the

funds. Second, intellectual property rights belong to the academic institution; efforts are

being made to give priorities to the partner company. Third, the procedures for contract

renewal are too complicated, simpler methods must be adopted. Commissioned research

programs increased from 1286 in 1983 to 4499 in 1997, while the research grants to

academic institutions grew from 2.2 billion yen to 33.3 billion yen during this period. A

striking observation reveals that more than 150 billion yen in research grants were made

by the Japanese private sector to Universities abroad; this amount is more than double

that granted to Japanese Universities. The number of patents registered in Japan for 2001

totaled 12580, among which only 161 belong to Japanese Universities [84].

The proposed Industry-Academia partnership model traces the effects of several

important attributes of the system on the effectiveness of the solution. Educational

institutions feed valuable research outcomes and insights into the Industry, thereby

strengthening the growth of the industry in the right direction. The industry benefits from

bringing in exceptionally qualified students to propel its growth further through

internships and campus recruiting. There is a strong interdependency between these two

entities in the value chain that must be nourished well in order to increase student

satisfaction, student enrollment, research and innovation in the educational institution as


well as breakthrough technologies, leading products and growth for the industry partner.

Furthermore, the industry in return benefits by reducing the costs of initial training and

bringing the student recruits up to speed on their technologies. The first three phases are

discussed in this section.

Previous work addressing the technology gap in educational institutions in developing

environments involved lot of words, but resulted in meager implementation. Recent

efforts [73] by Jhunjhunwala [3] and Dhande [53] are notably different from the previous

efforts because they are a step in the direction that Japan has taken as detailed earlier.

These efforts are not only helping their students participate in advanced engineering

design but are already creating value to people in developing environments by creating

their ICT infrastructure at an affordable cost. There are numerous initiatives in the

direction of helping the rural communities benefit from the technology revolution [24];

however, there are language and cultural barriers that need to be simultaneously

addressed as well. Prior study however brings one key insight into the proposed

framework. For successful proliferation of technologies into the developing

environments, developing low-cost technologies and considering regional culture and

language aspects are both extremely important.

3.2 Discovery Process

The discovery process was divided into understanding the market, issues and existing

solutions, studying the stakeholder needs and preparing taxonomy of technology in

education.

3.2.1 Market Research

Use of technology in the educational institutions has become an interwoven aspect of the

curriculum. The question is no longer if technology helps provide better learning but it is

one of how well one can leverage technology to impart world-class education as well as

foster cutting-edge research activities.


It should be noted that the PC and Internet related technologies used in the educational

institutions in some of the developing environments are as old as a generation while some

of them indeed have the latest and the best available technologies; the latter is an

exception and not a norm.

It is argued by some experts as the inevitable “Turning the bottom of the pyramid upside

down” [91, 7, 8, 15] and very attractive market to go after, and for various other reasons

such as lower cost of labor, access to centers of excellence and so on. More specific

market research details are provided in Chapter 5 in the context of India.

3.2.2 Stakeholder Needs Analysis

Students, researchers, educators, educational institutions, administrators, industry

partners, local governments and multinational corporations are some of the key

stakeholders. Although there are several different needs that each stakeholder may have,

there are a few needs that span the entire spectrum and are common to all of them,

important ones among them are, enhanced quality of education through hands-on

training, access to technologies that will not only enable innovation and creative problem

solving but also add to the intangible assets such as reputation of the stakeholder and

perceived value of the institution among the local and international communities.

3.2.3 Taxonomy of Technology in Education

The focus of this section is on developing taxonomy for engineering education. Each

individual educational institution has multiple needs in using technology in education.

The requirements vary among the institutions based on the kind of training and research

work being conducted at that institution. The requirements also vary among different

kinds of applications that the students in the institutions use. This section captures the

essence of these requirements and categorizes the need for ICT and the extent of

deployment.


Category Technology Requirements

Specific Aspects of Education

Enabling Technologies

High-end research organizations and institutions

High-end computational resources including supercomputers, powerful servers, workstations, robust and highly reliable power systems, access to information on state-of-the-art research and high-bandwidth internet connectivity

To enable researchers in the engineering field to perform advanced research including bio-engineering, distributed and parallel processing, image processing for weather prediction, artificial intelligence.

Software designed for the above mentioned specific applications such as AccuWeather, MIT’s exokernel etc.

Supercomputers from CDAC Servers and workstations from local computer vendors, high-speed optical backbone networks based on disruptive technologies from TeNeT group and other local equipment manufacturers and carriers such BSNL and MTNL.

Sophisticated software tools for number crunching and analysis, multitasking operating system environments, regression tools, database tools, artificial intelligence tools and reporting and presentation tools.

Open source Linux, Solaris for education, OpenOffice.org’s office productivity tools, other powerful software tools either developed in-house or acquired from FSF and sourceforge.net.

Mid-tier technology education institutions

Excellent Information and Communications infrastructure to support effective pedagogy. Computational resources to provide enhanced hands-on learning, access to world-class educational and research resources including faculty and students in other educational institutions.

First, provide adequate communication infrastructure to engineering students so that they can now perform research and collaborate with peers. Second, provide operating environment to allow computer science and electronics engineering students to develop

PCs from local computer vendors, last-mile connectivity through various up and coming technologies such as DSL, Cable Modem, Wi-Fi, VSAT and WiLL.

Software tools to provide added value to in-class training. Software operating

Open source Linux, Solaris for education, OpenOffice.org’s office productivity


environment that provides exposure to various kinds of real-world applications and work settings.

programming skills. tools, other powerful software tools either developed in-house or acquired from FSF and sourceforge.net.

Primary technical skills development institutes

A good collection of low-to-medium capacity computational resources that enable simple yet powerful introduction to technology and its applications.

This segment is not currently the focus of this thesis although it is stated here for presenting the complete picture.

Local vendors, used equipment and software from organizations such as computer aid international, All India Federation etc.

Table 3-1: Taxonomy for Different Technologies in Education Based on Their

Needs

3.3 Benchmarking

Benchmarks of four other technologies give a view of how others are trying to address

the same problem. To understand the magnitude of the problem better, let us first take a

look at how others have approached the digital divide problem.

3.3.1 Simputer

The Simputer [54] is a low cost portable device alternative to PCs, by which the benefits

of IT can reach the common man. It has a special role in the developing world because it

ensures that the illiteracy barrier to handling a computer is eliminated through the voice-

enabled interface. However, its applications to people who are uneducated are not very

clear at this point in time, given that there is little content on the Internet that is designed

with this category of audience in perspective. Localized content that is usefully to such an

audience must be developed and propagated for this technology to have the intended

impact.

Simputer concept has its roots in the belief that bridging the digital divide can be

achieved through simple, shared interfaces based on voice, sight and touch. The focus of


this solution is more on the rural parts of the country, although the technology could be of

tremendous value to students in terms of gaining access to Internet for file sharing, email

communication, researching etc.

3.3.2 Thin-client Thick-server Paradigm

A few organizations are taking a look at the client server technologies of the 1990s and

how they can help solve the TCO problem for educational institutions. Emergic Freedom

[55], based in India, is one such company driving this initiative of Thin-client and Thick-

server solution. There’s nothing new about this solution. It was the precursor to the

client-server technologies that has come to be used in almost all the software solutions

over the past decade. The issue with this is that there is need for excellent network

infrastructure for robust scalable implementation. It would work well in a Local Area

Network scenario but would depend heavily on the network infrastructure in a Wide Area

Network scenario.


3.3.3 Infothela

Infothela [34] is a mobile integrated platform supporting voice, video and data

transmissions without the use of electricity and wired network infrastructure. This is very

well suited to the rural parts of India where telecom and power suppliers do not have any

incentives to enter and lay the infrastructure. The focus again is on bringing computing,

Internet, and telephone facilities to the rural communities.

3.3.4 Digital Gangetic Plain

This project [53] is aimed at extending the widely know Wi-Fi (802.11, 802.16) network

beyond its traditional reach of few hundred feet into a reach of over 40 Km. This will be

able to provide Internet connectivity to the remote places where the land line

infrastructure may never materialize due to the economies of scale.

3.4 Relevant Literature Search

The existing work in this area touches upon four key aspects of the framework, high

clock-speed of the technology industry, total cost of ownership in technology for

educational institutions, technology availability and impediments to innovation. The

following sections take a look at each of these aspects.

3.4.1 High clock-speed

Most technology companies rely on speed as a major differentiator. There’s speed in the

introduction of newer technologies to market, there is speed in the product development

process as well as in the internal management’s decision-making process. Fine [9] coins

the term clock-speed to address the speed at which companies and industries change in

terms of product, process, and organization. The Figure 3-1 shows high-clock speed of

the electronic chip industry. We have seen how this plays into most of the electronics

industry, right from the PC to the digital camcorder. On one hand, it has changed the way

people learn, interact and communicate; on the other hand it has increased the digital

divide among between developing and the developed nations’ educational institutions.

Speed may be good for the Industry for several reasons including for the race to


differentiate from competition, but it sometimes has a high toll on its consumers. Just as

many consumers are hesitant or incapable of upgrading to the newer technologies due to

high costs of migration in terms of learning curve, additional training and technical issues

such as downtime etc., most educational institutions find it hard to upgrade their

technology infrastructure to the industry standard.

Some may argue that it is not necessary for academia to possess the latest and the best

available technology. However, the argument does not take into consideration that

providing state-of-the-art technology not only brings the students closer to the real world

but also kindles the spirits to innovate and excel over and beyond what already exists.

Figure 3-1: Clock-speed of the Electronic Chip Industry

3.4.2 Technology TCO

Total cost of ownership is one of the biggest deterrents for educational institutions to

acquiring technologies. The costs include not only the software and hardware, which is


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primarily available only at a premium in most developing environments because of the

costs incurred in importing them as opposed to manufacturing or developing them in-

house. The problem is two-fold, first the technology is not developed inside the country

for the most part and second, there are very few incentives from the government for the

local technology developers.

3.4.3 Technology Unavailability

Technology availability is a major concern among academia in developing environments

because it is almost always imported from the developed world. The state-of-the-art

technology is not only expensive; it starts to get attention in these environments only after

an initial success in the developed world. Hence, these environments tend to become

secondary or follow-on customers and never the lead adopters. Hence, they have little

impact on what the technology should do, how it should look, or what it should cost.

3.4.4 Impediments to Innovation Adoption

There are several aspects to take into consideration when trying to deploy a technology-

enabled solution for the issue at hand. Primarily, we cannot ignore the fact that many of

the developing nations lack proper Information and Communication Technology (ICT)

infrastructure. Some are going through recession and serious economic troubles and

many do not have the required trained professionals to make the best use of any such

assisting technology.

Educational Infrastructure, India Description of Decision VariablesInternet and Communications On average, 1 in 50 colleges have internet

access [76]. Many engineering colleges including the elite have a low-bandwidth connection to the Internet in the order of 2 Mbps at a maximum [77].

Laboratories Technologies used are 5 to 15 years older than the industry standard, setting aside the top few institutions.

Software Software is either obsolete or pirated, which is a problem in itself.

Computer to Student Ratio Roughly 1: 2000 [25]Access to Research Limited, local library is the primary source of


information.Access to experts in the field Very limited access to experts who can guide

the younger students and researchers in the field of their interest.

PoliciesDeterrents Lack of strong policy on manufacturing

electronic components, partial support from MNCs and lack of stringent rules on imports.

Propellants Strong educational system, growth in the private equity and bank systems.

Table 3-2: Technology Infrastructure in a Developing Environment

3.5 Populating the Academia-Industry Partnership Model

To populate the proposed model, key data on several variables are required. These

variables are discussed in the following sub-sections.

3.5.1 Student Enrollment

Student enrollment continues to be on the study rise in universities and colleges across

India, as presented in Table 3-3. Over the past decade the number of graduating students

has doubled from roughly 4 million to 8 million. This is an important factor in the

framework since it affects several aspects. First, increase in the number of students

directly affects the student to computer ratio, which is extremely low today. Second, the

number of students graduating has an affect on the job market. An increase in the number

of qualified graduates certainly makes the multinational companies that want to outsource

development for cheap labor. Third, the student perceived satisfaction is directly affected

by the time he or she is allowed to work in the laboratories or take assistance from the

faculty. The following table summarizes the growth of the educational sector in India

from early 1950s to late 1990s.


Institutions 1950-51 1990-91 2000-01Universities 30 117 254Colleges 750 7346 10200Enrolment('000s) 263 4925 7000Source: New Delhi: Ministry of Human Resources Development [78]

Table 3-3: Higher Education Growth in India

3.5.2 Research Budget

For many academic institutions in India, research budget is an alien concept. The

problem stems from the fact that there is little or no interaction between the academic

institution and the industry or the government to attract funds for research. Even though

there are extremely brilliant students enrolled in some of these institutions, their energy

and aspirations soon wane down once they realize that there is not much scope for

creativity and innovation.

3.5.3 Institution’s Innovation and Intellectual Property

One of the more successful models in academia in the developed world is the continuous

research and innovation in various aspects including science and technology, process

innovation and improvements, bio and Nano technologies and so on. These innovations

are made possible by committed researchers, very supportive industry and government

partners and energetic and extremely talented students. Innovations are the lifeblood of

many leading educational institutions in the US, for example, MIT’s innovations have

created numerous products, over 4000 companies, over $200 billion market value, and

well over a million jobs. MIT derives licensing revenues in millions on the innovations

through intellectual property right that are then funneled back into further research and

advancement of the facilities at the institute.

3.5.4 Institutions’ Reputation

Educational institutions in India in general have very high reputation outside the country.

Part of the reason is India’s qualified software professionals who have proved themselves

as competitive engineers, entrepreneurs and leaders in the software field. However, there


is very little that has been done by the industry and government inside the country that

leverages the reputed academic institutions. Simple ideas such as branding and marketing

the elite institutions in order to attract investments from multinational companies could

go a long way in helping these institutions advance. Reputation of the institution springs

from three different sources, its students’ performance in the industry, its researchers’

breakthroughs and its leaders’ vision.

3.5.5 Research Grants

In the United States, educational institutions receive grants from various sources such as

the government agencies, industry partners, non-profit foundations, wealthy individuals,

alumni and so on. In India, almost all the funding for public academic institutions comes

from the central and or state governments. This is a striking difference not only in the

sources of funding but also in the manner in which the system is structured. As discussed

in the thesis outline section, there is a very loose coupling between the industry,

government and the academia unlike here in the United States.

3.5.6 Academia-Industry-Government Value Chain

Academia, industry and the government are interdependent in order to function

effectively. A hypothetical look at the value chain is shown in Figure 3-2. The value

chain starts at the bottom with students and researchers who enroll in academic

institutions to gain knowledge and thereby become qualified to pursue employment

opportunity at a company. Next in the value chain is the academia, which provides

training to the enrolled students, infrastructure support for enabling better learning and

strong ties with the industry. On the other hand, academia also provides innovative

solutions to problems faced by the industry, while in return it receives research grants and

equipment grants from the industry. Industry benefits from the infrastructure support,

governing policies and subsidies that the government provides and in return it generates

taxes, growth in the economy and leadership through technology advancements. It is

critical to understand this value chain to keep in perspective the importance of systems

thinking, which is the right approach to solving the problem of digital divide in the

academic institutions in developing environments.


Figure 3-2: Academia-Industry-Government Value Chain

3.5.7 Recruiting

Industry hires graduates and resident students for jobs and internships. By bringing

potential graduates in-house, companies benefit in terms of solving critical problems that

need a fresh perspective. Industry will approach those institutions that are reputed, that

have established themselves as experts in the field and whose students have consistently

showed results. Hence, recruiting is an important variable to consider in designing a

system’s solution framework.

Chapter IV assimilates the factors discussed thus far into a systems framework. The focus

of the framework is to develop low-cost, flexible and synergistic solution that leverages

advanced technologies and emphasizes industry, government and academia partnership.


Industry

Academic Institutions

Government

Students and Researchers

InfrastructurePoliciesSubsidies

EconomyLeadershipTaxes

Qualified StudentsInnovations

InnovationsFunds

EducationInfrastructureDomain Expertise

GrantsTechnologyLeadership

Chapter IV: Systems Approach to the Solution

This section presents a systems approach to the digital divide issue in academia in the

developing world. First, it outlines two real-world implementations of system-engineered

solutions, analyzes how the solutions have fared since their deployment. The framework

draws upon the successes and failures of these two implementations as well as key

learning from projects discussed in Chapter 2, to build the proposed new systems

framework. The proposed framework is structured as follows: First, an overview of the

enabling technologies is presented. Second, a low-cost mobile wireless laboratory model

is discussed. Third, design specification for a grid service that can run in the mobile

wireless laboratory environment is presented. Fourth, a system dynamics model is created

for the grid service and reference modes, sensitivity analysis, behavior patterns of some

important aspects of the model and emergent dysfunctional properties are discussed.

Finally, the business aspects of the framework including the industry and government

support are discussed.

4.1 Real-world Implementation of System Engineered Solutions

In this section we will examine two real-world implementations of system engineered

solutions and try to draw from their success and failure factors in developing the systems

framework.

4.1.1 Leveraging Computer and Television Assets in Brazil to Deliver Educational Content

In a manner similar to broadcasting closed caption text on the TV, Gupta [6] and other

researchers present a framework where Internet related material such as web page content

could be broadcast from the TV station to its viewers by using the Vertical Blanking

Interval (VBI). This provides a unique approach to solving the last mile communication

infrastructure problem in developing environments through the efficient use of existing

national assets such as TV signals and computers.


VBI consists of the first 25 lines in the PAL-M TV signal that are typically not used to

transmit any information. In Brazil, which uses PAL-M signal, VBI provides a bandwidth

of around 150 Kbps. During the hours when the TV station is not broadcasting regular

TV material, the remaining 520 lines of signal could be used to broadcast data as well;

this provides a total bandwidth of 4 Mbps.

The advantages of using this model are many; it leverages a well tested and established

TV broadcast channel as the communication mechanism, and it piggybacks on the

already existing broadcast signal and utilizes the unused spectrum, thereby increasing the

efficiencies of the signal and it is scalable. The main drawback of this solution is that it

requires VBI inserters and decoders. At least one inserter, which costs approximately US

$5000, is needed for every station that wants to insert content into the TV signal. At the

destination end, every destination device irrespective of whether it, a TV or a PC, must

have a VBI decoder which costs US $100 to US $350 depending on the end device. Other

drawbacks include: one way passive content flow, low bandwidth availability during the

regular hours of broadcasting and limitation of the model to be extended beyond

delivering content, such as online experimentation and problem solving.

4.1.2 Media Lab Asia

Media Lab Asia (MLA) [41] was conceived as an academic research program dedicated

to bringing the benefits of new technologies to developing environments, with a special

focus on meeting the grand challenges in learning, health, and economic development.

The Government of India provided the seed funding of US $14 million, while expertise

and the vision was driven by the parent organization, Media Lab, at MIT. MLA

embarked on several projects in collaboration with the local elite research and academic

institutions. Initially it appeared that the MLA had taken a systems approach to the

problem of digital divide by bringing together the synergies among government, industry

and academia.

Incorporated in Sep. 2001, MLA has four key focus areas for research; (i). Low-cost rural

communication; (ii). Low-cost computing; (iii). Low-cost language interfaces and


sensors; and (iv). Consolidation of the first three projects embodied in field research

across the country.

MLA’s business model relies heavily on funds from the Government and from non-profit

organizations. Several projects including the ones discussed in Chapter 2 have been

created under these four focus areas. So far the impact of these projects on the developing

economies has been negligible. Some consider the Media Lab Asia a failure [89, 93].

MLA was set up as a research and collaborative agreement between India and MIT. In

April 2003, Department of Information Technology, India decided to restructure MLA to

a project-based initiative, probably to incorporate accountability and well defined goals;

the funding will now be provided entirely by the government. This is a major transition

from a research organization mode. The new organization could be compared to a

product development organization where the product, the target markets, the project

goals, budget, deliverables and schedules are all well defined. In this kind of

environment, unlike in the previous organizational structure at Media Lab Asia, the

opportunity for variance, creativity and innovation is much smaller. The DIT has also

further reduced the fund requirement of the project to US $200 million from the earlier

US $600 million; the original vision was actually for US $1 billion.

There are several factors that contributed to the perception that MLA is a failure. First,

the technologies developed so far have not had any significant positive impact on the

rural communities of India and other developing environments and did not generate the

critical mass necessary to develop economies of scale. Second, there appear to be open

issues around the intellectual property rights [88]. It is not clearly defined who will be the

beneficiaries of the innovations that emerge from MLA and to what extent. Third, there is

problem of finances. With the overall global economy in a dire situation, funding for

“next generation” research has become hard to find treasure. Finally, Media Lab has tried

to bring together very diverse set of fields such as biology, engineering, art, music and so

on to create unique products. However, the model has received wide criticism from the

insiders as well [89], even for the main lab in the US.


4.2 Systems Thinking

Many organizations, groups and individuals have come to recognize the fact that the

technology gap cannot be fixed by attacking the problem from any one angle. It is a

system of systems issue and must be viewed from that perspective to devise an effective

solution. The framework developed in this thesis focuses on the architectural aspects

shown in the dotted box in Figure 4-1.

Figure 4-1: Upstream and Downstream Influences in Architecting a System

The upstream influences such as low-cost technology alternatives, governing policies,

industry interaction and requirement from the academia are evaluated. Downstream

influences such as perceived quality of education, specific design tools and technologies,

implementation costs, tactical and strategic feasibility and their effects on industry and

academia partnership are evaluated.


Product Need

Design Goals

Process Method

Design Tools

Design Schedule

Impl. Team

Product Goals

Impl. Goals

Product Function

Flow

Product Form

Design Team

Product Operator

Impl. Schedule

Product Timing

Impl. Tools

Why What How Where When Who

Design Process Product Im

plement rocess

Source: Ed Crawley 2001

4.3 Proposed Technology Framework

There are four primary goals behind the proposed framework.

Provide industry standard software and hardware solutions to students in colleges through

collocated mobile laboratories.

Provide Internet connectivity through low-cost communication technologies in the last-

mile or the school-mile.

Provide the software necessary to reserve resources, dynamically allocate unused

bandwidth to applications.

Intelligently decide which network connection to use based on the quality of the link and

other parameters.

There are several new advances in technology arena over the past decade that, when

combined, are capable of providing an effective solution to the technology gap issue.

These advances can be categorized into three complementary solution spaces as shown in

the Figure 4-2. The first one is Internet and related technologies. Internet has become a

household name in the United States, however, only now are the developing

environments feeling its true impact. The number of Internet users in India, though very

small (7 million), is growing very rapidly at a CAGR of 71% from 1998 to 2001. With

the newer, less expensive technologies such as VFoIP, the affordability of telephone calls

even across different continents goes up tremendously. Suddenly, students in a rural part

of India have access to the best and brightest students, researchers and experts in the field

from around the country as well as overseas. Students will become empowered with

valuable course materials from renowned institutions like MIT through their Open

Course Ware project.

Second, it is the wireless revolution, which has had positive effects on how remote areas

are being ushered into the Internet era [4, 27]. Recent developments in the wireless

standards, security [38], affordability, broadband and Internet have helped IEEE 802.1x

technology to emerge as the strong leader in this pack. Already many enterprises, hotels,

fast food chains and home users have been convinced by the power of mobility and its


simplicity by being the lead users of this technology. Wi-Fi operates in the unlicensed

spectrum 2.5 KHz to 5 KHz in the United States; however, in India Wi-Fi deployments

are restricted to single campus networks. The government is working on opening up the

spectrum for public use [17]. Finally, Grid computing is gaining momentum among many

US and European institutions. Grid computing paradigm is based on the founding

principle of sharing resources across multiple actual organizations to form virtual

organizations that seamlessly allow applications, data, memory, disk space, computing

power and network resources to be shared in a coordinated fashion. The kinds of

applications Grid forum [57] is looking into are very high-end applications which require

very large amounts of compute power, disk resources and network capacity that any one

institution may not be able to possess. The Grid forum is developing recommended

standards around sharing protocols, resource availability management and security and so

on. This principle of sharing resources among organizations is an extraordinary match

between the requirements for state-of-the-art technology laboratories and availability of

idle resources in other partner institutions.


Figure 4-2: Circles of Complementary Enabling Technologies

4.3.1 Internet Technologies

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) [79] are being used as alternative to high cost leased

line technology by enterprises and educational institutions alike. The main advantage of

VPN technology is that instead of having a dedicated leased line between the source and

the destination points, the Internet is used as the transport mechanism. Packets flowing

between the source and the destination are encapsulated and sent in an encrypted fashion

using an encryption algorithm such as PKI or DES forming a tunnel that shields VPN

traffic from rest of the traffic.

4.3.2 Wireless Technologies

IEEE’s 802.1x protocol, also known as Wi-Fi, is gaining recognition as the solution to

the last mile bottleneck in today’s telecom environment. The maximum bandwidth

offered by 802.11a and 802.16 is 11 Mbps and the security protection is very weak. IEEE

has been working on the security aspects and the bandwidth limitations that made their

way into the 802.11g standard. 802.11g devices operate in the 5 KHz frequency. Wi-Fi


Internet Technologies

- Wealth of Educational Content - Ubiquitous - Standard Technologies- Open Course Ware- Online Laboratories- VPN

Grid Computing

- Lab Resource Sharing- Colossal unused CPU, Storage And Network resources- Evolving Global Standards- Research Oriented- Network perspective

Wireless (Wi-Fi)

- Ease of installation- No wires in last mile- Relatively inexpensive- Shared Medium- Moderately Secure & Reliable- No new infrastructure needed

Alliance is working on 802.11i and 802.1x that will use TKIP, AES security mechanisms

[80]. Wireless technology is certainly the most effective, simple and affordable

technology to provide connectivity to the students and researchers in the academia in

developing environments.

Initially the Wi-Fi signal range was limited to a few hundred feet; however, more

powerful high-gain antennas are coming into the market that can send and receive signals

in the range of a few hundred kilometers. For example, recently, a Swedish company,

named Alvarion, tested their high-gain antenna creating the record in Wi-Fi reach of 310

kilometers [30].

4.3.3 Grid Computing

Grid computing is an extension of campus-wide distributed computing architecture into a

global network of compute resources, namely, processing capacity, storage capacity and

network bandwidth, which enables coordinated sharing of these resources through

standard protocols. The current focus of Grids is on high-end applications that require

heavy availability of compute resources. However, this same technology can be also used

very efficiently to provide shared resources to low-end applications as well. To quote the

inventors of the Grid computing paradigm, “A computational grid is a hardware and

software infrastructure that provides dependable, consistent, pervasive, and inexpensive

access to high-end computational capabilities.” [58]

There are basically four types of resources that can be shared; they’re processing power,

storage, applications and network. Grid infrastructure tries to re-use the IP and related

protocols; thereby it not only avoids reinventing the wheel but also takes advantage of an

already proven concept and a working system.

4.3.2.1 Grid Technology Overview

The Grid protocols, services and infrastructure can provide on-demand compute

resources to even the most remote parts of the world, where there is a need for compute


resources to perform low-end application processing, through lightweight application

services developed on top of the Grid infrastructure.

Figure 4-3: High-level Grid Architecture and Functional Blocks

Sun Microsystems describes these low-end applications as “Standard daily workloads

consisting of many medium-size, single-threaded jobs, each running a few minutes to a

few hours, without the need to provide interactive results. “ [60].

Figure 4-3 depicts the Grid architecture. There are striking similarities between the Grid

stack and the Internet OSI model. It is a deliberate decision on designing the Grid

architecture around the already widely successful and tested IP architecture. Grid

architecture is first and foremost a protocol-based architecture, protocols define the

mechanism by which VO users and resources negotiate, establish, manage, and exploit

sharing relationships. A standards-based open architecture facilitates extensibility,

interoperability, portability, and code sharing. Grid follows an hourglass model. Top of

the hourglass is a broad spectrum of end-user applications, the middle portion

representing the core of the Grid infrastructure, which is protocols and abstractions for

resource identification, sharing and scheduling. The bottom portion interfaces with the

low-level hardware.


Grid Protocol A

rchitecture

Internet Protocol Architecture

CollectiveApplication

Transport

Internet

Resource

Connectivity

Fabric Layer Link

Application

4.3.2.2 How Grids can offer a Part of the Solution?

The basic principle underlying the Grid Computing concept is sharing of computing

resources effectively across multiple research organizations in order to fulfill a common

set of scientific and business goals. The key here is “sharing” resources. Today, most of

the focus of researchers and grid deployments is around high-end applications such as

genomics, visualization of medical records, collaborated system design such as aircraft

manufacturing and so on which require vast amounts of storage space for the data

analysis, tremendous processing power and high bandwidth network connections to

retrieve and or store data collected from/to remote sites such as chemical reactors etc.

However, the same Grid technology could be easily applied to the digital divide problem

in the academic sector of many developing environments, here the problem being lack of

resources to perform even the basic tasks such as state-of-the-art compilers to develop

programming exercises as part of the coursework, or performing mathematical

calculations in a spreadsheet, or preparing a presentation. Many of these applications are

out of reach for students in most colleges in developing environments due to budget

constraints. Here, by sharing these resources from the Grid, one could enable the

educational institution to provide their students access to state-of-the-art technologies at

very low cost.

4.3.4 Mobile Wireless Enabled Laboratories

Wireless technology has penetrated at a feverish pace in some of the developing

environments. For example, in India, the number of wireless telephone subscribers has

grown to over 40 million in a short span of 5 years while the wired infrastructure has not

been able to penetrate to even half that level in over 50 years. Wireless technology can

and should be promoted in the developing environments for Internet connectivity as well.

A simple wired network installed at IIT, Kanpur cost the institution roughly US

$425,000. As noted in previous chapters, the majority of the academic institutions in

India do not have even a tenth of this cost allocated for technology spending.

Furthermore, this majority do not have ties into the local industry, the multinational

corporations and the government unlike few of the elite academic institutions in the

country, which makes it extremely hard for them to acquire state-of-the-art technologies


and upgrade them as and when necessary. This section evaluates an alternative approach

to providing state-of-the-art laboratories at a comparatively low-cost for the institution.

Kumar [34] and others have demonstrated the power of low-cost mobile computer

stations that have a computer with wireless Internet access stationed on an easily

available locomotive. It is a standalone unit that runs on a power generator and travels

across several rural regions of India to provide information resources to the rural farmers,

such as weather forecasts, modern farming techniques and so on. On the other hand,

organizations including TeNeT and others are actively taking advantage of the advances

in long-range wireless technologies to provide low-cost solutions to remote parts of India

as well as other developing environments. Academic institutions are well positioned to

benefit from the synergies among various enabling technologies. Following sections

present a low-cost, wireless enabled mobile laboratory shared among several local

academic institutions in the range of 50 Km -350 Km radius.

The architecture for the proposed mobile wireless laboratories is illustrated in Figure 4-5.

Required Technology: 1 Wireless enabled router that supports VPN, 1 Wireless access

point, 10-20 PCs, 5-10 Workstations and 1-2 Servers.

Technology

Mobile laboratories are not uncommon; many enterprises in the United States make use

of mobile laboratories to demonstrate their state-of-the-art research and products to

customers by showcasing the relevant work in a mobile station that travels the country.

The technology necessary to implement mobile laboratories is mature now, with an

Alvarion’s long range Wi-Fi access point and computers and workstations installed with

wireless PCI cards available in the market. The Wi-Fi capability built into the access

point and the PCI card does Ethernet to Wi-Fi and vice-versa translation at the layer 2.

Internet Protocol (IP), which has become the de facto network layer protocol for the

Internet, is used as the layer 3 protocol for Wi-Fi.


Bandwidth Requirements

The bandwidth provided by the 802.11b technology is in the order of 11 Mbps and

802.11a is 56 Mbps but the long-range Wi-Fi is still limited to less than 10 Mbps and

with a potential to be much higher in the future. The mobile laboratory can be extended

with VSAT connectivity option, which is a widely adopted last mile solution in the

academia in India today.

Policies

Sharing resources is fundamental to the proposed model, which requires policies defined

to delineate the usage of resources by individuals and individual institutions. Some key

aspects such as who can use the resources, who can share the resources with other, what

resources can be shared, to what level, who pays for what resources, accounting, billing

and reporting the resource usage to relevant applications or individuals must all be

configured as policies, preferably using XML schemas.

The mobile laboratory is envisaged as a shared technology among engineering

institutions in a particular location in the radius of 10 to 100 Kilometers.

Costs

Average cost of wireless access points and Wi-Fi cards has fallen significantly over the

past few years and it continues to fall further. Around 1998 the combined kit would cost

over US $500, but at the time of this writing (April 2003), it is possible to get one for

under US $125. The Wi-Fi PCI cards are about $50. High-end PCs cost about US $1250

to US $ 2000, workstations and server machines cost around US $6000. A more detailed

cost model will be discussed for the entire mobile laboratory solution later in Chapter 5.

Implementation options

In Figure 4-4, each remote site can be viewed as a local educational institution which has

signed on with the lab service provider. Each site has an option to either have a wireless

access point installed in their premises or sign on for the mobile lab service.


Figure 4-4: Prototype Architecture for a Wireless (802.16) Enabled Mobile Laboratory

Individual sites subscribe to the mobile lab service and are provided with connectivity

and access to the Internet at scheduled times. A simple calendar software tool

incorporated into the lab service could provide functionality for the subscribers to

schedule lab service in advance. The proposed solution can be implemented in three

different phases. First, a wireless enabled “school-mile” mobile computer laboratory can

be established as a kiosk. Second, the laboratory can be VPN enabled. Finally, a grid

service such as the XLab can be installed in the laboratory which will not only bring the

state-of-the-art software and hardware platforms to the students from across the country

but also from around the globe. The following section describes the details of each phase

one level further.

4.2.5.1 Phase I

A mobile laboratory draws on some of the successful models from the past and applies

them to the academic scenario. It builds on these models by introducing VPN based

technology; resource sharing software and network smarts such as automatic bandwidth


Remote Site B

Remote Site C

Remote Site A

Remote Site D

Hub Site

WAP HS

WAP HN

WAP A WAP B

WAP CWAP D

- VPN enabled- High-gain antenna(802.16)- Policies

Radius 50 Km – 300 Km

management based on the link quality, application request and other parameters. The

academic institution interested in the service will need to sign up for a local mobile

laboratory service from the provider. We can envision different viable business models

for this service ranging from a regular flat monthly subscription fee to usage-based fee.

The goal of this section is not to formulate the best business model; it is best left to the

service provider.

4.2.5.2 Phase II

In this phase Virtual Private Network functionality will be introduced. VPNs enable

multiple subscribers and multiple applications to share the network bandwidth as though

each of them has a dedicated link. This is possible with the newer layer 2 Ethernet

switching technology that is gaining popularity in the enterprise today. However, VPNs

also introduce several issues that need to be addressed. First, there is the security and

privacy issue, each individual site’s data traffic must be secured and protected from the

other traffic streams sharing the network bandwidth. Second, it involves guaranteeing

quality of service and different classes of service for different sites, as well as different

applications in the same site. Finally, it needs additional software and configuration on

the client side and at the central hub site.

4.2.5.3 Phase III

Grid services are still evolving; many standards are yet to be defined and not many low-

end applications are being run on the grids today. As discussed in the previous sections,

grids can be leveraged for high-end application services to the academic institutions. For

target institutions running high-end applications has only been a distant dream, grids may

very well be the ideal mechanism that makes this dream a reality. In the future

incarnations of the grid services, running low-end applications, sharing software, disk

space, network connections and processing power will bring rich set of functionality

available through the mobile.


4.2.5.4 Inside the laboratory

The mobile laboratory shall be equipped with industry standard computers, workstations,

and communication equipment such as the wireless hub, a router and a content filtering

and firewall switch as shown in Figure 4-5. It will also include standard operating

systems such as Linux and UNIX variants such as Solaris and key application software

and productivity software such as OpenOffice’s spreadsheet, presentation packages.

Figure 4-5: State-of-the-art Mobile Laboratory

The mobile laboratory will be evaluated more closely in Chapter 5, where the framework

developed in this thesis is applied to Indian academic environment in specific. A cost

model, comparison with an already implemented solution in one of the Indian elite

institutions is performed to see what benefits this low cost, flexible and state-of-the-art

mobile laboratory could bring to academic institutions.

4.3.5 Architecture Design for a Grid Service Running in Mobile Laboratory

The infrastructure for computation hardware and connectivity were presented in the

previous section. This section details a software service that uses Grid technologies and

extends the capabilities of the infrastructure presented in the previous section.


Passport VPN Enabled Router

PCPC

Server

Database Wi-Fi Link

Wi-Fi Link

Internet

Firewall and Alteon Layer 2-7 Subscriber Edge Content Switch

Figure 4-6: Lab Service System Model using Grid Infrastructure

Key aspects in terms of architecting the system such as who is the end user, who will

provide the service and to whom [1] have been well thought out before diving into the

design. Figure 4-6 shows one of these models at a functional block level.

The functional blocks can be delineated into three planes:

Grid Application Plane

Grid Service Plane and,

Grid Resource Plane


MDS

XLab Service API

Grid Application Plane

Grid Service Plane

Grid Resource Plane

LDAPRSLGSI

Authentication/Authorization

Policies

Reporting

SLA XLab Core Engine

GRAM

GARA

RIPS RIPS RIPS

Fork

Netw

ork

Storage

Other

GRAM

RIPS RIPS RIPS

Fork

Netw

ork

Storage

Other

The application plane consists of several functional modules. However, they can be

categorized into the front-end which is the Graphical User Interface (GUI) and the

service API into the Grid Service Plane. The back-end, which is the intelligence of XLab

core that glues together many functional blocks such as security, error handling, service

level agreements, policies and so on. Finally, there is the communication server that

seamlessly connects the application to the required resources on the Grid. This section

will first describe some of the important core modules in the Grid architecture [59],

which are part of the Grid Service and Grid Resource Planes, and then follow it with

description of XLab grid service and its functional modules.

Grid Architecture for Resource Allocation (GARA): GARA acts as the central repository

of resources and manages multiple distributed GRAM modules. GARA has a “big

picture” view of resources across multiple domains, unlike GRAM which is very specific

to a particular administrative and/or network domain.

Monitoring and Data Services (MDS): MDS provides access to static and dynamic

information of resources. Basically, it contains the following components:

a. Grid Resource Information Service (GRIS): GRIS is the repository of local

resource information derived from information providers.

b. Grid Index Information Service (GIIS): GIIS is the repository that contains

indexes of resource information registered by the GRIS and other GIISs.

c. Resource Information Provider Service (RIPS): Resource information providers

translate the properties and status of local resources to the format defined in the

schema and propagates this information up to the GRAM.

d. MDS client: A search for resource information that you want in your grid

environment is initially performed by the MDS client.

Grid Resource Allocation Manager (GRAM): Main components of GRAM are:

a. Resource Specification Language (RSL): RSL is the language used by the clients

to submit a job. All job submission requests are described in RSL, including the


executable file and condition on which it must be executed. You can specify, for

example, the amount of memory needed to execute a job in a remote machine.

b. Global Access to Secondary Storage (GASS): GRAM uses GASS for providing

the mechanism to transfer the output file from servers to clients. Some APIs are

provided under the GSI protocol to furnish secure transfers. This mechanism is

used by the globusrun command, gatekeeper, and job manager.

c. Dynamically-Updated Request Online Coallocator (DUROC): By using the

DUROC mechanism, users are able to submit jobs to different job managers at

different hosts or to different job managers at the same host.

The XLab Service application is a lightweight process that runs on the host computer. It

connects to the Grid for accessing compute resources. There are several functional blocks

that must be implemented in order to have a basic working model of the XLab service on

Grids. We can categorize the XLab service functional blocks in the following way:

i. Policy Control

ii. Grid API

iii. User Interface

iv. XLab Core Engine

4.3.5.1 Policy Control

XLab Policy Server functional block, shown in Figure 4-7, contains the following

modules.

Service Level Agreement (SLA): The services offered by the Grid to XLab are

monitored, measured and recorded by this module. It provides an interface specification

which describes what level of resource sharing occurs, who can access the resources,

when the resources can be used. It handles the error scenarios and exception handling

when the agreement is infringed upon by the XLab client. Resource allocation is the

control of specific resources including, identification and specification of the resource,

the amount of resource to be allocated, the day and time the resource is to be allocated,


backup and fail-over strategies. SLAs are a way to provide guarantees on resource

availability. Resource usage violation monitoring includes aspects such as, what to do

when a "user" tries to use more than the amount allocated to him/her/it. Resource usage

accounting can be done on a per user basis.

Authentication and Authorization: The positive identification of the user and the

application, with possibly encrypted traffic streams and the rights for the authenticated

traffic stream to utilize the specific resources.

Policies: This module consists of policy server, policy client typically the policy decision

point (PDP), policy object specification language, and the communication protocol such

as LDAP or COPS. Access lists, SLA related policies, and other objects can be stored in

the Directory Server shown in Figure 4-7 [90].

Figure 4-7: XLab Grid Service Policy Interactions

4.3.5.2 Grid API

The Programming Interface into Grid consists of the Resource Specification Language

(RSL) and a messaging environment to act as the transport mechanism. RSL is a notation

that is understood by the grid components when application requests access to resources.


XLabCore Engine

XLab Grid Interface

XLab Management

Console

XLab Policy Server(XPS)

Grid Interface

Policy Objects

Policy Information

Application Data

DirectoryServer

It is based on eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and can be easily extended to

incorporate new kinds of resources and attributes to the resources. For example, current

grid implementations only understand the CPU and disk storage as resources, one of the

new resources that will eventually be added is the network bandwidth. Hence, network

bandwidth related specifications need to be incorporated into the RSL in order for any

application to access network resources available in the grid. The transport can be

implemented as straight TCP/IP socket or could be abstracted one level further and

implemented in Java Messaging Services (JMS) or could even be encapsulated into

Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and transported over in Hyper Text Transfer

Protocol (HTTP). Similarly, depending on the transport mechanism, we could apply

different levels of security that the transport protocol supports, such as Secure Sockets

Layer (SSL) if using HTTP and MD-5 and DES if using JMS and so on.

4.3.5.3 XLab User Interface

This interface provides the user of XLab grid service to authenticate the person, submit

jobs, schedule resources, and view reports generated by the application. It also enables

the XLab administrator to configure policies that get translated into policy objects and are

stored in the policy database. For example, policy objects may be defined in XML [28]

as follows:

<!ELEMENT XLAB_POLICY (Info, (ApplicationPolicy?, UserPolicy?, LabSchedulePolicy?)>

<!ELEMENT Info EMPTY><!ATTLIST Info version CDATA #REQUIRED timestamp CDATA #REQUIRED author CDATA #REQUIRED>

<!ELEMENT ApplicationPolicy (DiskPolicy?, CPUPolicy?, BandwidthPolicy?)><!ATTLIST ApplicationPolicy applicationtype CDATA #REQUIRED applicationOS CDATA #REQUIRED applicationfeedback CDATA applicationid CDATA>

<!ELEMENT DiskPolicy EMPTY>


<!ATTLIST DiskPolicy diskamount CDATA #REQUIRED diskunit CDATA #REQUIRED>

<!ELEMENT CPUPolicy EMPTY><!ATTLIST CPUPolicy cputime CDATA #REQUIRED unit CDATA #REQUIRED>

<!ELEMENT BandwidthPolicy ><!ATTLIST BandwidthPolicy bandwidth CDATA #REQUIRED unit CDATA #REQUIRED>

<ELEMENT UserPolicy><!ATTLIST UserPolicy userid CDATA #REQUIRED useraccesslevel CDATA #REQUIRED>

<ELEMENT LabSchedulePolicy><!ATTLIST LabSchedulePolicy userid CDATA applicationid CDATA starttime CDATA #REQUIRED endtime CDATA #REQUIRED startdate CDATA #REQUIRED enddate CDATA #REQUIRED>

4.3.5.4 XLab Core Engine

An integral part of the XLab service is the core module that glues together all the other

modules, coordinates interactions with the Grid API and performs the overall exception

handling for the service. The core module incorporates the XML parser such as DOM or

SAX and the routines needed to traverse the object hierarchy. It is responsible for any

standard I/O processes such as recording reports, creating, sending and receiving

messages, creating subscribers, queues, topics, connection factories if JMS is used as the

transport protocol. Incorporating SOAP parser and HTTP bindings if SOAP/HTTP is

used as the encapsulation and messaging mechanism.

The timeline diagram in Figure 4-8 represents the protocol messaging that happens

between the XLab Service and the Grids.


Figure 4-8: Protocol for the XLab Service Application to use Grid Services

4.3.5.5 XLab Grid Service Description

In the Grid world, everything is a service. Resource discovery is a service, requesting

access to resources is a service and applications that attach to the Grid become custom

services to the end-user. Hence, the application needs to provide a service description in

Web Services Description Language (WSDL) [28], a language defined on the XML

primitives. The grammar for a service description can be represented as described next. The serviceDataDescription element has the following non-normative grammar:

<gsdl:serviceDataDescription name=”NCName” element=”qname”

minOccurs=”nonNegativeInteger”?

maxOccurs=(”nonNegativeInteger” | “unbounded”)?

instanceOnly=”boolean”?

mutability=”constant”|”append”|”mutable”?>

<wsdl:documentation .... />?

<-- extensibility element --> *

</gsdl:serviceDataDescription>

New grid services must describe their capabilities using the above grammar, for example,

the XLab grid service could be described as follows:

<gsdl:serviceDataDescription name=”XLab” element=”null”

minOccurs=”1”

maxOccurs=”100”

instanceOnly=”true”


End-User XLab MDS GARA Resource

ResponseResource Request

Allocate Response

Send Job Information

ResultsReports

Authentication

Query Database

mutability=”constant”

<wsdl:documentation />

<!--- This is a new grid laboratory service for academic

institutions in developing environments ->

4.3.6 Point-to-Point Shared Online Laboratories

Sharing laboratory resources among academia is not an alien concept. A few institutions

have done similar work in the past including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,

USA. Internet enables anyone from anywhere with an internet connection to access

remote laboratories that are online. MIT launched one such lab for electrical and

electronic engineering students called the WebLab Project [18, 36]. The online lab offers

several advantages. First, it offers the flexibility for MIT students to access the labs when

they want to, and from where they want to access them. Second, it manages the students

working on the limited equipment through very efficient queuing techniques. Third, it

provides the results of the experiment almost instantly to the student in a nice and easy to

read format. It also generates spreadsheet format data and results so that it becomes

extremely simple for the student to import the tables into a spreadsheet program and

perform further analysis. Fourth, it reduces the staffing requirements for the laboratories.

Fifth, there is little or no training required because the user interface for controlling the

lab equipment is extremely simple. Finally, it eliminates a lot of the safety concerns

students have when working inside a real laboratory. WebLab architecture is presented in

Figure 4-9.

Figure 4-9: MIT’s Shared Online Laboratories, WebLab 4.0 Architecture

WebLab has been used in the course VI classes at MIT for over 2 years and the results

seem to be fabulous with excellent positive feedback from the student population. It

proves the point that this is a very promising technology that could be adapted by other

schools and partner universities. In fact, WebLab has successfully demonstrated that not

only is the concept practical but also that it is extremely valuable. By enabling students

from Singapore (part of Singapore-MIT alliance) to conduct electronic experiments

remotely on real equipment at MIT Cambridge campus, from their labs in Singapore,

WebLab takes the laboratories to students rather than students coming to laboratories. To

the faculty, WebLab offers a way to look at the equipment usage patterns over the

semester in relation to the assignment deadlines; it can be easily extended to provide

grades and other course related material automatically.


Several companies now offer online laboratories to test and evaluate microprocessor

chips. One of them is techonline.com [37]. It has developed an entire suite of operating

system tools and test and analysis software tools that enable researchers, engineers and

hardware designers to conduct tests on the latest, some yet to be released,

microprocessors.

Costs and Scalability

WebLab is essentially a free service offered by MIT to other interested partner academic

institutions. HP and other enterprise partners have donated the lab equipment. So far MIT

course VI and Singapore-Alliance students have used the system. There are efforts in the

direction of opening up the lab to interested institutions in developing environments and

others in the US. The beauty of the Internet based online laboratory is that, it is very

scalable, it doesn’t have the time and space barriers that normal laboratories have, which

makes WebLab and other similar projects excellent applications for providing low-cost

laboratories to students developing environments around the world.

4.4 Technology Strategy in Education

The thesis presented an alternative solution using shared mobile laboratories; a specific

use case scenario and how the proposed solution will be a low-cost solution in

comparison to an existing solution are presented later in Chapter 6.

The following sections present a systems dynamics model to obtain some preliminary

understanding of the proposed shared mobile laboratory framework.

4.4.1 System Dynamics Model

Sharing online laboratories among participating academic institutions affects the

perceived quality of education while minimizing the cost structure for these institutions.

Innovation diffusion typically follows an S-shaped curve. It is important to identify what

are the positive feedback loops that propel growth and what are the negative feedback

loops that limit growth [2].


Before developing the system dynamics model, several reference modes and decision

variables have been identified. Represented in Figure 4-10 are some of the reference

modes.

Figure 4-10: Reference Modes for the Proposed System Framework

Fear and hope are the two most important aspects when deploying a new system. The

Figure 4-10 shows what the fear and hope curves may look like in the shared mobile

laboratory system deployment. The curves for the cost of education and technology

spending follow similar patterns, the fear is that the proposed framework will increase the

costs exponentially because of uncertainty around technology, policies and participation

of academic institutions. The need for acquiring newer technologies may oscillate as

more and more new technologies arrive in the market periodically, but the hope is that

this variability may be eliminated entirely if the grids are used to share resources from

other institutions that already own the new technologies and are willing to share them.

Shown in Figure 4-11 is a system dynamic simulation model created using Vensim [95]

software.


Time (Years)

Cost of Education

Fear

Hope

Time (Years)

Fear

Hope

Technology Spending

Time (Years)

Fear

Hope

Enterprise Training Costs

Time (Years)

Fear

Hope

Need for purchasing

new hardw

are and softw

are

Need for Sharing IndustryStandard

Hardware/Software

Number of Schoolsusing the system

Cost of Education

Pressure to upgradesystems in school

Technology spendin schools

+

+

AffordableEducation

Student Enrollment

-

+

+

Actual Sharing-

Perceived Quality ofEducation

-

- Number of schoolssharing their Systems

Figure 4-11: Technology Sharing Among Participating Institutions Model

The shared technologies model is a self-balancing loop as can be observed from the loop

polarity. The model attempts to gain a preliminary understanding on how sharing

resources affects an academic institution in terms of technology spending, student

perceived quality and the cost of education.

4.4.2 Sensitivity Analysis

We can observe from the sensitivity simulation results presented below to check what

ratio of “sharing to using” yields a well-balanced system.


Shared Technologies Model

100-Schools,100-Sharing100-Schools,10-SharingPerceived Quality of Education

0.40.30.20.1

0Actual Sharing

403020100

0 5 10Time (Year)

Figure 4-12: Perceived Quality of Education100-Schools,100-Sharing100-Schools,10-SharingActual Sharing

403020100

"Need for Sharing Industry Standard Hardware/Software"43210

0 5 10Time (Year)

Figure 4-13: Actual Technology SharingFrom Figure 4-12, we can observe that the perceived quality of education among the

students remains constant for a period of time and then falls to a lower level because

initially not all the resources that will be shared will be used up by the student population

but when more students start to use the system, the perceived quality drops and stays


steady at that level as the usage over time will become constant. The need for sharing

technology follows the actual technology-sharing curve.

Insight: An obvious but important note from these two graphs is that, the system will

enter a death spiral if the number of institutions using the shared resources is

disproportionately larger than the number of institutions sharing their resources. In order

to mitigate this risk of a non-functioning system, the participating institutions must create

policies based on the policy infrastructure described in the XLab service architecture in

section 4.3.3.

100-Schools,100-Sharing100-Schools,10-SharingCost of Education

100755025

0Technology spend in schools

40302010

00 5 10

Time (Year)

Figure 4-14: Cost of Education with respect to technology spending


Figure 4-15: Effect of perceived quality on technology upgrade pressure

Cost of education as shown in Figure 4-14, increases as the institutions’ technology

spending increases, since it drains the education budget for that institution through

upgrades, maintenance and service not only in the year of acquisition but throughout the

technology life cycle. However, notice that the cost of education initially remains more or

less the same independent of the number of institutions sharing their resources, and after

a period of time the system starts to oscillate. The oscillation is due to the fact that there

is a negative feedback loop and time delay in the system. The cost of education falling

due to the number of institutions sharing their resources creates negative feedback loop,

however, there are newer technologies introduced, students, faculty and the participating

institutions take time to adapt to this change, which causes a delay in the system between

the sharing of the existing resources and the introduction of newer technologies into the

system.

Figure 4-15 shows the behavior of pressure to upgrade technology infrastructure in the

system with respect to the perceived quality of education.


100-Schools,100-Sharing100-Schools,10-SharingPressure to upgrade systems in school

40302010

0Perceived Quality of Education

0.40.30.20.1

00 5 10

Time (Year)

4.4.3 Simulation Results and Discussion

The simulation results, as presented above, give us an indication that the perceived

quality of education drops almost exponentially when the number of schools sharing their

resources in the system is only a fraction of the total number of schools using the system.

The actual sharing of resources among a bigger student population not only increases the

need for sharing more resources but also diminishes the value of such a system if not

many of the participating institutions are sharing their resources.

4.4.4 Emergent Dysfunctional Properties

First, the companies that dependent on their sales of equipment and software to

educational institutions may resist this resource-sharing model because it may hurt their

growth. Second, there is the free-rider problem. If the policies for sharing and using

technologies are not properly designed, it leads to some institutions overloaded with over

utilized resources. Finally, availability of the system depends on the number of users on

the system at any point in time; therefore, the system response time depends on its usage.

4.5 Proposed Business Framework

The business side of the framework brings together learning from prior digital divide

initiatives that have been presented in previous chapters. In addition, the framework

expands on the industry, government and academia partnership model discussed in the

systems thinking section. Industry must play a more important role in the academia.

Going back to the value chain presented in the previous chapter, industry must provide

state-of-the-art infrastructure to the academia, funds for research and development,

mentors to coach students and career building and on the job training programs such as

internships. Industry and government should participate in defining the academic

curriculum and in setting policies that govern the intellectual property rights.

Industry and government must provide necessary support as shown in the Figure 4-17 to

build a successful academic environment. Improving the information technology

infrastructure is only a piece of the bigger puzzle, which is to provide state-of-the-art

education through best practices.


Figure 4-16: Business Aspects of the Proposed Systems Framework

4.6 Bringing the Framework Together

In the technology section of the framework the various up and coming technologies that

when combined have the potential to provide an elegant solution to the digital divide

issue in academic settings, introduction to two such technologies namely, wireless and

grid computing, an architecture design for the proposed wireless enabled mobile

laboratory and tools necessary to implement the proposed software and hardware

acquisition strategies have been presented.

In the business section of the framework, emphasis is placed on interdependence and

coupling among industry, academia and the government. Several areas of improvement

have been identified based on the market research and learning from prior research in the

field and are presented as shown in the Figure 4-16.


Industry

Government

- Provide infrastructure and support- Setup training and career building programs- Participate in academic curriculum definition- Fund research and development activities- Mentor students

- Encourage systems thinking and problem solving for the real-world issues- Promote understanding of technologies and standards with a global perspective

Academia

- Establish a clear vision- Set supportive policies- Encourage industry involvement- Define benefit sharing- Define metrics to measure progress- Dedicate resources to measure progress- Evaluate progress and make room for continuous improvement- Provide a perspective and an opportunity for understanding systemic issues

- Develop systems thinking- Encourage students and researchers to take on real-world problems as topics for research- Innovate for real-world problems- Leverage IT such as the ones proposed in this thesis including wireless connectivity for the last mile and grid computing for access to state-of-the-art technology infrastructure to create efficient learning environment- Involve government and industry liaisons on the boards for curriculum design, policies and international reach

Chapter V: Applying the Framework to India

India is widely recognized as the high-quality, low-cost producer of software products. It

has demonstrated its excellence in Information Technology and software development by

leveraging its established base of qualified engineers and is undergoing a strategic and

tactical evolution from an offshore, low-cost IT provider to a leader in both computer

software and hardware provider markets. The majority of the offshore software

development projects handled by software development houses in India were up until

now non-mission critical, derivative products and services. Academic institutions in India

have played a very strong role in the successes in the software exports industry by

imparting to their students the skills necessary to fulfill the need for software

programmers. With the changing trend towards more research and innovation centric

projects both for local industries as well as for overseas clients, it is inevitable for India to

reevaluate its technology investment in developing the supporting infrastructure that

fosters creativity and nurtures cutting-edge software development and hardware

manufacturing strategies, while retaining the low-cost, high-quality model. Part of this

supportive infrastructure is the need to build expertise and knowledge base in the

academia to provide necessary skills and hands-on learning through industry standard

hardware and software technologies. Policies to encourage indigenous electronic

component manufacturing, communication networks, and enhanced academia-industry

partnerships constitute a critical part of this effort as well.

India is gaining an edge over many of its counterparts in the developing worlds by

leveraging available best in class software development talent and by consistently

delivering on high-quality results to its customers. In fact, India is one of the largest

software exporters in the world. Furthermore, India has begun to embrace hardware

development and manufacturing, hoping to replicate its success with the software

development and exports. Low cost indigenous manufacturing has proven to be a

successful model even for its own local markets [3]. It becomes imperative for India to

grow its pool of knowledge workers in the hardware and manufacturing sectors in

addition to other infrastructure enhancements.


As India makes strides into these increasingly competitive markets, the need to improve

technologies that assist in hands-on learning in educational institutions becomes an

important factor. In doing so, delivering quality results, as India has come to be

recognized for, is evolving beyond those goals that already ensure customer driven [10]

low-cost and high quality to new levels that include objectives at tactical as well as

strategic levels. This evolution seeks to address how improving education drives better

results for the industry and how to integrate different educational institutions’ needs as

well as research capabilities with the capabilities of industry partners to create a global

software and hardware development and export strategy.

India has a very strong educational and value system. It has demonstrated excellence in a

wide range of subjects including space research, software, mathematics, engineering and

so on. India, recognized by industry and academia as one of the leaders in Information

Technology, has some of the best engineering and management schools in the world [46].

India has a large number of students graduating each year; however, there are a

disproportionately large number of aspirants and qualified students for higher education

than the elite few schools can possibly accommodate.

Section 5.1 provides technologies used for education in India. Section 5.2 puts the IT

outsourcing model into perspective, section 5.3 details the strategy India might adopt for

further successes in the field of IT, section 5.4

5.1 Overview: Three Environments

India today has 214 universities and equivalent institutions including 116 general

universities, 12 science and technology universities, 7 open universities, 33 agricultural

universities, 5 women’s universities, 11 language universities, and 11 medical

universities. Besides, there are universities focusing on journalism, law, fine arts, social

work, planning and architecture and other specialized studies. In addition, there are 9703

colleges where 80% of undergraduate and 50% of postgraduate education is imparted.

The number of students has reached the level of 6.75 million and there are 321,000


teachers in the higher education system. The government expenditure on education was

of the order of US $1 billion in 2000-2001, and during the subsequent period this

increased further [48, 66]. Let us consider two other developing environments, China and

Mozambique.

The technical education system of India shown in Figure 3-1 gives the broad

classification, project’s focus is on the blocks of the system that have been highlighted

with red boxes. These blocks can be classified into three categories.

1. High-end research organizations and institutions

2. Engineering and technology educational institutions and,

3. Primary technical skill development institutes

Table 3-1 develops the taxonomy around the specific aspects of education, required

technologies and enabling technologies.

Figure 5-1: Indian Education System with Thesis Focus Segments Highlighted

Since 1994, Mozambique has been one of the fastest growing economies in the world, but

it remains one of the poorest countries with a per capita of US $210. Further sustained

economic growth is critical for long-term economic development. Mozambique is facing

an acute shortage of professionals including qualified engineers [70]. The number of


Focus segments for the thesis

graduating students is very low, 800 out of 16 million people, which results in very high

cost per student. These issues are a major concern for the Government.

In China, the number of higher education institutions in the year 2000 reached 150,

including 53 universities, 74 independent colleges, and 23 junior colleges. A total of

1,008,241 undergraduates were enrolled in these institutions, which also had 83,861

graduate students in 1,410 graduate programs [63]. Government spending on education

totaled US $17.1 billion in the year 2000. The scientific research spending totaled

approximately US $990 million in 1998 [61, 62]. Cost per student in the higher education

sector surged from US $4,800 to US $20,500 between the years 1976 and 2000 [64].

China’s Ministry of Science and Technology has established over 150 laboratories

around the country under the “State Key Laboratories” program. The government

spending on key technologies in hi-tech field is around US $100 million, which is only a

small portion of the proposed US $1.1 billion overall spending for key technology R&D

[65].

5.2 Technology in Education

Background

Table 5-1 and Figure 5-2 show the growth of Personal Computers in the India [25].

050000

100000150000200000250000300000350000400000450000

Number of PCs

1998 2001 Cumulative

Year

Education PCs in India

Education PCs in India

Figure 5-2: PC Penetration into Educational Institutions


Education PC Penetration India 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003* CumulativePCs sold in Education 31000 44500 62000 63054 89852 150518 440924Education PCs per 1,000 0.03 0.04 0.06 0.06 0.09 0.15 0.44Based on ‘An Education PC for India’ Skoch

Table 5-1: PC Penetration into Educational Institutions

Figure 5-3 and Table 5-2 show the growth of Internet usage in India. There is a steady

linear growth in the Internet usage in the country. With the advent of mobile phone based

Internet, Wi-Fi and Ultra wideband wireless connectivity, this trend is poised to pickup

more momentum.

01000000200000030000004000000500000060000007000000

Number of users

1998 1999 2000 2001

Year

Internet users in India

Internet users in India

Figure 5-3: Internet Growth in a Developing Environment

Number of Internet users

1998 1999 2000 2001

India 1400000 2800000 5500000 7000000

Table 5-2: Internet Growth in a Developing Environment


An important finding from the market research is that even though there is a steady

growth in the PC and Internet proliferation, the price of building the network for

providing connectivity services has not fallen. It costs a carrier close to US $1000 per

user to setup the network in a country like India [3]. One of the primary reasons for the

situation is that the equipment needed to setup the network such as routers and switches

need to be imported at a very high price. Also adding to the problem is the fact that not

many users are willing to pay the high price to enroll in the services due to lack of

relevant local content. There needs to be a two way effort, one that drives the cost for the

services down by encouraging local OEMs like TeNeT and the second that drives the

development of relevant local content in local languages. In an Indian environment,

network infrastructure costs drop significantly with the rise in subscriber base as shown

in Figure 5-4 [3].

Figure 5-4: The Cost of Network Infrastructure in a Developing Environment

India has taken several measures in the direction of improving the national education

system through the use of science and technology. For example, the Ministry of

Education (MoE), a governmental organization, recently embarked on broadcasting 24/7

educational programs on the television through a dedicated channel called “Gyan

Darshan” [49]. MoE also initiated to broadcast educational programs on a dedicated radio

channel, which is by far the most widely accessible channel to the school going

population in India. On the other hand, commercial vendors such as TechTV [92] are

venturing into this space through attractive educational entertainment programs.


However, these programs only take the learning experience so far by providing

infotainment through broadcast medium.

Technology spending in most educational institutions, setting aside the top few, is very

meager amounts. Some of the elite schools in the country have basic Internet facilities,

such as a 64Kbps-128Kbps line, that you would find in most of the US homes. Wi-Fi

networks that are springing up in campuses around the US are a distant future for many

of the college campuses in India. However, a handful of multinational corporations have

setup state-of-the-art laboratories for specific research such as the Intel Micro fabrication

lab in Indian Institute of Technology and Intel’s Wireless Networks Research labs in

Indian Institute of Sciences. It is important to note that out of the hundreds and thousands

of colleges, only a handful have such facilities.

The TeNet group at IIT Madras has demonstrated the capabilities in-house for developing

complex hardware such as routers and switching gear for the telecommunications.

However, the group has also identified lack of expertise in manufacturing and in areas of

the hardware design and fabrication technologies as major drawbacks in the current

infrastructure [5].

Prior to 2002, India had high import duties on all hardware that was imported which

resulted in high cost of PCs and other hardware products adversely affecting India. Since

Jan 2002, Indian policy makers decided on zero import duties, essentially giving a blow-

in-face for all the local manufactures. It should be noted that this was a classic case of

trying to address a problem by fixing the symptoms and not the root cause. Since relying

on external sources for hardware is not a sustainable model, India has created an IT task

force to understand the hardware industry and what needs to be done to encourage

indigenous hardware manufacturers.

In the same lines, it has recognized the importance of having industry standard hardware

and equipment in the laboratories for higher education. A lot of the successes in software

industry can be attributed to the well-trained human capital India possessed. The industry


is well supported by software training institutions like NIIT as well as the universities,

and numerous smaller training houses. A similar momentum needs to build around the

hardware and manufacturing capabilities to achieve parallel successes.

5.3 IT Outsourcing in the Perspective

Many multinational corporations are continuing to increase their investment in

Information Technology outsourcing to Indian software companies. Offshore IT

outsourcing opportunity has created a large market for software development houses,

which in turn helped the local economy and the students graduating out of school in

particular. It has not only helped many trained students to take on challenging projects

but also created a whole new culture around the fast paced industry. The local

governments and educational institutions embraced the outsource model as it generated

new businesses, growth in the economy, more employment opportunities and an

improved lifestyle. There are over fifty offshore IT solutions providers in India serving

companies in the United States alone and the forecast for the industry looks very positive,

some expect it will grow to $77 billion dollars by year 2008.

IT outsourcing is important for the educational institutions because it demands more

responsibility from them to train their students in skills based on industry hardware and

software technologies and thereby directly affecting what technologies are used in the

classroom and in laboratories. IT outsourcing could be considered as a potential driver

that would require providing access to industry standard software and hardware

technologies to students and researchers in academic institutions.


Figure 5-5: Evolution of Offshore IT Outsource Model and its Impact on Value Creation

The software outsourcing model shown in Figure 5-5 closely follows the famous S-Curve

[11, 45], in the late eighties and the early nineties it was a disruptive model. However,

over the last decade it has become part and parcel of many multi-national corporations

business strategy. The model is undergoing a tremendous ramp-up due to the severe

economic downturn and companies’ desire to cut development costs in more ways than

ever. However, the value created for the consulting houses through this model, though at

its best today, will reduce significantly over a period of time and they will need to catch

onto the next S-Curve for sustainability.

5.4 Strategic Direction for Indian Technology Industry

Indian software and hardware companies are now faced with tremendous competitive

pressures from other low-cost manufactures and software developers in Asia and other

developing environments. India needs to create a sound strategy that addresses issues

such as weak hardware and manufacturing expertise, growing demand for electronic


Time

Value Created w

.r.to Effort

Disruption Ramp-up Saturation

Dominant Design

Commodity

Compete by Fast TTM

Compete by cost

Compete by Intellectual Property2003

components and high-end products such as optical routers, wireless routers and storage,

database, application and web servers.

Indian software industry must raise the bar like never before to mitigate the risk of

loosing its leadership position in the software outsourcing market. Similarly, the

hardware design and development, manufacturing industries need to get a boost from

governing policies and support from equity markets.

5.5 Application of the Framework

Previous section gave an overview of the Indian academic sector, technology use in

academia, perspective on some of the drivers behind the need for technology diffusion in

academia and the strategy India might take going forward. In the following sections the

developed framework, which was presented in Chapter 4, will be applied to the academic

setting in India. First, an overview of the existing communication infrastructure for the

academic institutions is discussed and then a use case scenario is presented to understand

a typical technology infrastructure deployment costs, the new framework is discussed as

an alternate deployment model and a cost comparison is performed to demonstrate that

the low-cost wireless enabled mobile laboratory is a more compelling model that the

academic institutions should adopt.

5.5.1 Education and Research Network, India

ERNET [32], India’s Education and Research network connects a small fraction of

colleges out of the large number of over 8000 colleges in the country. Figure 5-6 shows

the backbone of ERNET. The ERNET as it exists today is enabled by Microwave and V-

SAT technologies. The network connections range from 64Kbps to 2.48 Mbps [33]. The

aggregate capacity of the network is 6.48 Mbps with an average data transfer of 20GB

per day.


Figure 5-6: Education and Research Network, India

5.5.2 Use case scenario for cost comparison

One institute in India has built a new information and communication technology

infrastructure [13] that is detailed below. Note that this is a campus network and is

connected to the ERNET backbone that was described earlier.

The InstituteIIT Kanpur has established itself as one of the finest educational institutes in India

especially for IT and technology related studies. It has a 1000 acre (4.05 sq Km) campus

and houses 2250 students, 300 faculty members, and other supporting staff.

The need

The institute had to provide its students the necessary technology skills to upgrade or

share their knowledge. There was a need for a robust campus network that provided

every student access to internal servers and the Internet.

The solution


NCST Juhu,Mumbai

ERNET HQ, Delhi

VECC, Kolkatta

IUCAA, Pune

Kanpur

Bhubneshwar

UoH, Hyderabad

IIT, Chennai

Guwahati

IISc, BangaloreVSAT Hub

- Backbone links are all 64 Kbps up to 2 Mbps- Overlay Satellite network for backup- 7 International Gateways- One VSAT Hub

With consultancy from D-Link the campus LAN of the institute now has strong router

architecture, a three-tiered switching design, over 60 servers, and reliable backbone

connectivity.

The benefits

Every room in the hostel has a shared 10 Mbps LAN connection a student can use to

access data repository servers and the Internet. The reliable LAN backbone allows

information to be shared across all areas of the campus.

Cost of the infrastructure for the institution

Item System Cost Average unit cost

49 Servers Rs. 13,818,000 Rs. 282,000

5 Routers and Switches Rs. 4,700,000 Rs. 970,000

8 Web Servers Rs. 1,504,000 Rs. 188,000

3 Database Servers Rs. 211,500 Rs. 70500

Total Cost Rs. 20,233,500 Rs. 1,510,500

Table 5-3: Approximate Cost of Technology Infrastructure Installation

The total cost of the system is conservatively estimated at Rs. 20 million (US $430,000)

which is exorbitantly high and out of reach of majority of the higher education

institutions in India, for many of the state colleges and universities the entire fiscal year

budget is smaller than this amount. This solution is an exception and not a norm. This

thesis proposes that this model is not-scalable and impractical to implement on a large

scale and furthermore demonstrates that the wireless enabled mobile laboratories using

shared technologies is indeed the right approach to solving this problem. In the proposed

model, not only do the academic institutions benefits from gaining access to the industry

standard hardware and software technologies at a fraction of the cost but also avoid the

costs of ownership, maintenance and upgrading to newer technologies as and when they

are available. The costs of depreciation are also now the service provider’s problem and

not the academic institution’s anymore. In other words, academic institutions use an


outsourced model for access to industry standard hardware and software technologies and

pay per use basis.

5.5.3 Wireless Enabled Mobile Laboratory Service

The previous discussion on this topic revolved around the technology and architecture.

Here a brief overview of different service options is presented and then a cost model is

developed for a simple deployment scenario. The wireless enabled mobile laboratory

service can be provided by a service provider, similar to a network service provider, with

different service levels. A basic service plan may include access to 1 PC, 1 Workstation,

1 Wireless device and a network link of 2 Mbps. Second option might be a service that

provides access to 5 PCs, 2 Workstations, 1 Wireless device, productivity software

applications, Linux and Windows Operating Systems and a network link of 6 Mbps.

Third option might be, 10 PCs, 4 Workstations, 2 Wireless devices, all popular software

applications, Internet connectivity with 11 Mbps. Final option might be 20 PCs, 5

Workstations, 2 Wireless devices, all popular applications, support for the applications,

training, and Internet connectivity at 56 Mbps.

Costs of deploying the technology framework presented in Chapter V are presented in

Table 5-4.

Item System Cost Average unit cost

20 PCs Rs. 1,200,000 Rs. 60,000

2 Wireless enabled VPN

routers

Rs. 1,940,000 Rs. 970000

5 Servers Rs. 376,000 Rs. 188000

1 Database Servers Rs. 70,500 Rs. 70,500

Total Cost Rs. 2,986,500 Rs. 1,510,500

Table 5-4: Costs of Deploying a Wireless Enabled Mobile Laboratory


By enrolling for the wireless enabled mobile laboratory service from the service provider,

the academic institutions are much better off than having to deploy a complete solution as

in the case of IIT, Kanpur. While the solution is not the exact setup as the one in IIT, it is

a much more scalable, flexible and affordable model for majority of institutions in India.

In addition, not every institution needs to own a similar kind of complete autonomous

setup. With the advent of Grid computing partner institutions will be able to own

complementary technologies that can be shared amongst each other.

Bandwidth available by deploying the proposed model might range from 2 Mbps to

11Mbps or higher depending on the kind of service the institution subscribes to and it is

typically much higher than the 2 Mbps link that most institutions get from ERNET. The

issue of security and privacy arises in the proposed model and it needs to be given due

consideration.


Chapter VI: Strategic Recommendations and Conclusions

The thesis has identified several key lessons from the research and implications of trying

to solve the digital divide in academic settings without understanding the systemic issues.

The following sections revisit some of the main issues, solutions, their implications and

recommendations based on the proposed framework.

6.1 Grid Computing

Grid computing is a powerful paradigm that can solve the technology needs of

developing environments by providing access to industry standard software and hardware

technologies at a fraction of the cost. Grid computing provides the necessary environment

to share applications, data, network resources, storage and processing capacities through

strict policies and guaranteed quality of service models. Grid infrastructure has evolved

to a point where several commercial as well as non-commercial versions of the grid are

now available for academic institutions to evaluate and deploy immediately. As

discussed in Chapter 5, new grid services can be created on top the fundamental grid

architecture that are customized for each individual institutions’ needs and objectives in a

simple manner.

6.2 Wireless Last-Mile Connectivity

The last mile connectivity problem that is well understood in the developed environments

is an equally critical problem in the developing environments. The costs of digging

trenches to lay new fiber cable and installing communication equipment to carry the

signal such as filters, transponders, repeaters etc. are enormous. The high cost of

installation versus the low return on the investments discourages the telecom carriers to

develop the last mile network infrastructure. The last mile connectivity issue can be very

elegantly addressed utilizing wireless infrastructure, specifically utilizing the evolving

802.16 wireless metropolitan area networks and high-gain antennas that are coming out


into the market, as discussed in Chapter 5. The wireless networks can be shared among

participating institutions to bring down the total cost of ownership for any single

institution to a fraction of the actual cost.

6.3 Understanding the Nature of the Technology Gap

Bridging the digital divide among academia in developed and developing environments is

a daunting task. While the thesis addresses this issue by taking a holistic perspective of

the systems issue, the framework could be extended to look at a much deeper level.

Although it helps to understand how the systems interact in the value chain and how

having better equipped laboratories may help improve the quality of education, at a

deeper level the technology infrastructure may indeed play a smaller role. More

important to the quality of education may be the idea that the students, faculty and the

industry work together to understand real-world issues and address them in the classroom

to develop world-class understanding of the fundamentals and the issues.

6.4 Sources of Digital Divide

The semi-conductor industry has followed the Moore’s law doubling the number of

transistors on a chip every 18 months while the Metcalf’s law holds true for

communication technologies, the value of the network is directly proportional to the

square of the number of people using the network. The developing environments are

among the majority that do not have Internet connectivity and academic institutions in

these environments are no exception.

An emergent property of the clock-speed of hi-tech industry is the increasing gap

between the haves and have-nots. As much as one would like to curb the speed of hi-tech

industry, it is not the right approach. A more reasonable approach would be to use the

efficiencies generated thereof in producing low-cost software and hardware devices that

can cater to the needs of students and researchers in developing environments.

6.5 Readdressing Roles of Academia and Industry


The need for industry-academia collaborations cannot be stressed further. Qualified

students who understand the industry, industry standard technologies and issues faced by

the industry are valuable assets to the industry as much as they are for the academia.

Educational institutions must recognize the strategic importance of tie-up with industry

partners and the government. On the other hand, companies must encourage internal

programs that attract the best students for internships and other research activities on

campus.

6.5.1 Rule of 10s and Concurrent Training

Rule of 10s, is used in defining how the cost of quality progresses with respect to where

in the value chain the quality issue is traced and fixed. The costs can be attributed to

several factors such as the time to learn the new technologies, training costs, the cost of

early mistakes, and cost of assigning a mentor to the fresh graduate hire and so on.

Students should be trained for on the job functional expertise requirements while they are

still in the academia.

6.6 Reevaluating Technology Gap in Developing Environments

It was not long ago when only a handful of schools had access to computers and

information and almost none had Internet connectivity in India. A lot has changed today,

many of the academic institutions that are the cream of the country have very

sophisticated infrastructure, one that is comparable to that of some elite institutions in the

US. However, the change is incremental due to several factors, one of which is clock-

speed of technology and the other is high-cost of equipment ownership. This thesis

presents a framework where these issues could be resolved with low-cost alternate

solutions.

6.6.1 Industry in the value chain

Industry needs to play a stronger role in academia by providing avenues for students,

researchers and faculty to involve in innovative research and advanced technology

development [20, 21] at low-cost that makes it affordable to the local institutions and


students. TeNeT has successfully demonstrated how this can be achieved under the

constraints. Many more academic institutions must follow this initiative.

6.6.2 Process Improvement

Educational institutions in developing environments can uncover many valuable insights

into process improvement by looking to external sources such as some of the state and

federal academic and research institutions in the United States. As pointed out in this

thesis, the government can also take successful models in the hardware and

manufacturing industries in countries like China as well as some of the lean

manufacturing principles the Japanese automobile manufacturers have implemented.

6.6.3 Enterprise Approach to Technology Gap

Enterprises tend to focus on their core competencies and outsource other non-core

products and processes. Academic institutions could acquire technologies and laboratory

equipment that align with their strategic goals in delivering best in class education to their

students and leverage hardware and software from other institutions for any resources

that they lack.

6.6.4 Metrics

Cost per student is one metric that is critical to developing environments where the

illiteracy rate is typically high. Keeping the cost of education down is a valid goal;

however, if evaluated in isolation it may actually hinder the overall performance of the

academic sector. As we have seen in the system dynamics model, increasing the

affordability by reducing the cost of education puts stress on the system because

increased student population requires expansion in technology infrastructure. This is

detrimental to the quality of education that the students receive, unless the support

structure, which includes the total number of faculty, number of computers, available

laboratories and other important infrastructure, is reevaluated. These goals are in

contradiction with each other. A fine balance needs to be struck to create the most

appropriate learning environment.


6.7 Academic Institutions in IT Centric Economies

Software and hardware technologies have become inherent attributes of educational

settings. In order to reap the full benefits from established technology infrastructure many

aspects have to fall in place. Industry and government commitment to academia must

reflect the importance of technology in education. Within the academic setting, the

responsibility also lies with the faculty, students and researchers to strive for continuous

process improvement and instilling innovative culture. Academic institutions must

develop a balanced scorecard view. Industry must setup industry liaison programs with

the interested academic institutions and proactively approach the issue. As mentioned in

the previous sections, concurrent training for students may provide an excellent return on

investment for the industry partner.

6.8 Conclusions

Academic institutions in developing environments face a number of tensions between

conflicting goals that need to be tackled and managed by the institution and the

government at large. This thesis focuses on the tension between imparting the best in

class learning and keeping up with the high-cost and high clock-speed of information

technology industry.

IT acquisition has been pursued incrementally in the academic environments. The

problem with this strategy is that it is rarely the case that one can build on the older

technologies incrementally and have an aggregate capacity of IT infrastructure after a

period of time. There are issues inherent to the software and hardware, such as the

compatibility, memory and disk space requirements. Sometimes evolving standards make

some older technologies obsolete, for example, the 5.25 inch floppy disk and even the 3.5

inch diskettes are things of the past with the introduction larger capacity CD-ROMs and

Zip disk technologies.

There are two avenues for radical improvements in the academic environment. They are:


Breakthrough technologies: The thesis points out that wireless communications have

come of age, their performance is comparable to the Ethernet when it was invented but

the technology is as promising as Ethernet due to its simplicity. For example, Wireless

local loop (WiLL) has already proved its value in some parts of the rural India as the last-

mile solution; it is perhaps just a matter of time before WiLL penetrates into every

academic institution in India. Wi-Fi standard (802.11, 802.16) is quickly gaining ground

as the standard in the last-mile setting, it is affordable and simple, it operates in

unlicensed spectrum and its security capabilities are being fortified in the next version.

Grid computing has already established firm ground in the high-end physics, genomics

and imaging applications around the world. In the US alone, there are several hundred

million dollars dedicated for the development of grid related technologies by the industry

players such as IBM, Sun, HP and the government alike. Together Wireless and Grid

computing promise good solutions to the academia striving to keep costs of education

down while at the same time provide state-of-the-art IT infrastructure to their student

community.

IT Growth: This can be viewed as two parts, internal IT expansion in the country and the

external IT outsourcing projects. In general there’s has been a surge in the usage of IT in

almost every field, including healthcare, government, utilities, banking, and

transportation. This is only the beginning of a long transformation that is going to happen

over the next decade. IT companies in the developing environments must invest in R&D

for developing applications and content for the local markets. The government must set

policies that encourage IT diffusion in and growth and the industry must embrace this

vision and expand on low-cost software development and hardware manufacturing for the

local markets. Growth in IT is very important especially for the engineering institutions

in the developing environments because it will provide their students lucrative

employment opportunities but it comes with a cost. These institutions will need to train

their students with tools and methods that meet industry needs.

This thesis attempts to develop a framework to address the issues raised in the problem

statement. A tactical framework and a strategic framework are presented and some


implications and recommendations have been addressed. Finally, what is unique about

this framework is that it proposes to leverage the most advanced accessible and

affordable technologies available in the country and formulates a method of approaching

the problem with the tactical and strategic backing necessary.


Appendix A: Terminology

Term Description

API Application Programming Interface

Balanced Scorecard A new holistic approach to aligning cost structure of organization

with corporate strategy

BSNL Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited

CAI Computer Aid International

CDAC Center for Department of Advanced Computing

Clockspeed Speed at which an industry changes in terms of product, process

and organization

COPS Common Open Policy Service

CYDF China Youth Development Foundation

DES Data Encryption Standard

DOM Document Object Model

DPEP District Primary Education Program

DSL Digital Subscriber Line

DUROC Dynamically Updated Request Online Coallocator

ERNET Education and Research Network, India

FSF Free Software Foundation

GARA Grid Architecture for Resource Allocation

GASS Grid Accessible Secondary Storage

GIIS Grid Information Index Service

GRAM Grid Resource Allocation Manager

Grid Collection of compute resources

GRIS Grid Resource Information Service

GSI Grid Security Infrastructure

GUI Graphical User Interface

HP Hewlett-Packard

HTTP Hyper Text Transfer Protocol


ICT Information and Communication Technologies

IIT Indian Institute of Technology

IP Internet Protocol

IT Information Technology

JMS Java Messaging Service

Kbps Kilobits per second

LAN Local Area Network

LDAP Lightweight Directory Access Protocol

MD-5 Message Digest (encryption algorithm)

MDS Monitoring and Directory Services

MLA Media Lab Asia

MNC Multi National Corporation

MoE Minsitry of Education

MTNL Maharastra Telecom Nigam Limited

NASSCOM National Association of Software and Communications

NIIT National Institute for Information Technology

OEM Original Equipment Manufacturer

OSI Open Standards Interface

PDP Policy Decision Point

RIPS Resource Information Provider Service

RSL Resource Specification Language

RTOS Real Time Operating System

SAX Simple API for XML

SLA Service Level Agreement

SOAP Simple Object Access Protocol

SSL Secure Sockets Layer

TCO Total Costs of Ownership

TCP/IP Transport Control Protocol/Internet Protocol

TeNeT Telecommunication and Networking

TTM Time To Market

UGC University Grants Commission


VFoIP Voice and Fax over Internet Protocol

VO Virtual Organization

VPN Virtual Private Networking

V-SAT Very Small Aperture Technology

Wi-Fi Wireless Fidelity IEEE 802.11, 802.16 standards

WiLL Wireless in Local Loop

WSDL Web Services Description Language

XLab A Laboratory Grid Service

XML eXtensible Markup Language

Table A-1: Terminology


Appendix B

1998 (billion) 2000 (billion) 2008 (billion)

Software Industry,

India

$3.9 $5.7 $87

Software Exports $2.7 $4.0 $50

IT Industry in India $6.1 $8.6 $140

Table B-1: Indian Software Industry Growth (Source: NASSCOM)

Decision Variable EquationActual Sharing IF THEN ELSE("Need for Sharing Industry Standard

Hardware/Software", EXP("Need for Sharing Industry

Standard Hardware/Software"), EXP(-("Need for Sharing

Industry Standard Hardware/Software")))

Need for Sharing Industry

Standard Hardware/Software

INTEG(Number of Schools using the system * Student

Enrollment) / Number of schools sharing their Systems

Student Enrollment Affordable Education

Affordable Education 1 / Cost of Education

Cost of Education RANDOM UNIFORM(0, 100, Technology spend in schools)

Technology spend in schools Pressure to upgrade systems in school

Pressure to upgrade systems in

school

1/ Perceived Quality of Education

Perceived Quality of Education 1 / Actual Sharing

Table B-2: Shared Technologies System Dynamics Model Equations


Figure A-1: Chinese Education System Overview


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http://www.semi.org/web/wmagazine.nsf/4f55b97743c2d02e882565bf006c2459/805086236696825088256c620067ce86!OpenDocument

http://www.semi.org/web/wmagazine.nsf/4f55b97743c2d02e882565bf006c2459/805086236696825088256c620067ce86!OpenDocument

http://usembassy.state.gov/tokyo/wwwhus0050.html

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