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>Our district provides a direct connection to the interent for most of our
>schools and has dial in access for faculty but not students. I was
>wondering if your district has addressed this issue, how it was resolved,
>and any problems or successes you have encountered.
>thanks for you help
>Mark Rippy

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We've been dealing with this issue ever since we got on the Internet. It's
a supply/demand problem. Our campus has limited public access terminals
(mostly old VT100 "dumb" terminals), and few faculty have computers in
their offices. Most of us do our work from home via dialup. We have had
problems with this from day 1: not enough lines, lines not connecting,
disconnects during sessions, line noise causing comms software freezes or
even system crashes. Our U's phone office and computing services have
reconfigured the setup several times. We now have 18 dialup lines, but at
any given time, half of them may be nonfunctional and the rest busy.
I and other faculty have spent as long as 3 hours redialing before getting
a connect.

Clearly, with the current situation, giving students dialup access is a
major no-no. So far, few of them have modems (and most don't even have
computers at home), but this is beginning to change, and the demand will
grow as more faculty begin giving internet-based assignments. It's going
to be a real dilemma.

Dialup lines are only part of the problem. We need a massive system
upgrade in order to accommodate more users. Our VAX server will only
accommodate about 60-65 sessions at a time. Even with just faculty,
administrators, and staff online, it's not uncommon to get a "try again
later" message during business hours. So we need more, newer, more
powerful servers if we're going to start connecting our 4,000+ students,
even from campus. This involves big bucks and (of course) more lab space,
which won't be available until a new building is constructed. It's also
a staffing/training problem. Academic computing have their hands full
just trying to keep the network up. They can barely deal with faculty
training and support, let alone student training. Our few students who
do have accounts often don't know how to use them, even if they're
computer science majors.

Your district may be facing similar problems. If so, limiting student
access may be a question of numbers vs. system/line capacity and the
$$$ to expand it, especially if you're in a public school situation as
your note suggests. Wish I had a convenient solution to offer. If I
were in the U.S., I'd encourage my students to join a commercial service
with full internet access (e.g. Delphi). Here this isn't an option yet,
because one commercial provider is very expensive ($28 per hour) and
the other is slow and unreliable, and in the end just as expensive but
with more headaches. Good luck!

Kate Coffield
American University in Cairo
kate@auc-acs.eun.eg