Pennsylvania education secretary Eugene Hickok (right) says the Internet can drive learning outside the classroom. Director of educational technology John Bailey sees significant changes in schools involved in e-commerce.

At first glance, there seem to be more differences than similarities between new economy business and the nation's educational system.

Schools can't give teachers stock options. They cannot issue IPOs. They are slower by nature. Responsibility is less direct. Buck passing and inertia often rule. Up-front money for online retooling is as rare as a sad sixth grader in June.

There are, however, some similarities. Both have objectives to meet. Both must keep constituents-stock holders in one case, parents and officials in the other-in the loop and satisfied. The health of both plays a big role in how we think of ourselves as a nation.

Add another to the list: Business and education share a hunger for the value brought by the Internet and other emerging technologies.

The extended educational enterprise, as in business, focuses on reaching out to vendors and suppliers. The twist is that its main goal is to reach out to students instead of customers. It is a distinct group with very specific needs.

Unfortunately, the technological adoption rate is slow, perhaps because it is a cumbersome industry with a lot of baggage.

"We educate our children on an agricultural timetable in an industrial setting and tell them they live in a digital age," says Eugene Hickok, education secretary for Pennsylvania.

That notion is changing, though. "With technology, education doesn't have to end at the classroom door. In the digital age, we can harness the power of technology to make the world our classroom," Hickok says.

Familiarity is important. The universal acceptance of the Internet and, indeed, its saturation in the lives of students, teachers and administrators makes it likely that they will embrace it as an educational tool. This potential may be realized by revolutionary Internet-based access to, and management of, educational materials. Potent online technologies and applications-such as data warehousing and portals-offer educators promising ways to more efficiently manage students and more cheaply buy materials.

The good news is that governments, especially on the federal level, are making more money available to hook schools to the Internet for both teaching and administration. For instance, the E- Rate technology subsidization program annually kicks in $2.25 billion for modernizing telecommunications and information services.

This has been a semiprivate undertaking as well: For years, municipalities have demanded that cable companies provide Internet connectivity as a condition for franchise approval or renewal. In the main-either due to altruism, the desire for good PR, or both- operators proactively fulfill the obligation.

The Internet shows signs of transforming the educational realm, but progress is slow. Only 20 percent of the educational institutions surveyed by InternetWeek for the Transformation Of The Enterprise study say they are operating an extranet or an Internet-based supply chain network. A third are conducting Web-based e-commerce. And a quarter of them are operating an enterprise portal.

Distance Learning

Distance learning is not a new concept. The idea of leveling the playing field between students in North Dakota and New York City-or enabling a student with a broken leg to keep up with her classmates- has been a goal of educators for decades. It is also almost singularly appropriate for the Internet.

In 1997, governors of several Western states created an entirely online university to educate a dispersed population: Western Governors University, whose board of trustees includes Eric Benhamou and Eric Schmidt, from 3Com and Novell, respectively, and the governors of Wyoming, Alaska and Washington. The university, which opened its virtual doors in 1998, has several hundred students. It added a bachelor's degree online in September.

The university, which offers associates', bachelors' and masters' degrees, uses the Internet for both teaching and record keeping, says chief technology officer Steve Curtis.

The university does not create its own content. Rather, it uses XML links to provide student identities and information to affiliated universities and organizations. The interfaces ensure students get enrolled for online classes, Curtis says. He says the process of enrolling with the affiliate and making sure a student gets the proper credit is handled through e-mail.

The online learning industry is trying to set standards for sharing records in XML. The IMS (Instructional Management Systems) Global Learning Consortium, for example, is developing and promoting open specifications for online distribution of learning materials. The group's goals include setting standards for locating and using educational content, tracking learner progress, reporting learner performance and exchanging student records between administrative systems. Members include Apple Computer, Microsoft, the University of California and federal agencies.

IMS's site, www.imsproject.org, has already developed first- version specs for interoperability between formats used for questions and tests and for managing learning resource metadata.

XML isn't the only Internet-influenced technology used at Western Governors University. Students pay tuition via a Microsoft-supported online commerce application, and WGU reimburses its content via old- fashioned checks. Oracle's new Ipayment software, which is now being installed, will allow electronic funds transfers, Curtis says.

Few expect educational endeavors to mirror e-marketplace hubs or an automated transaction engine in the business world. There is, however, an acknowledgement that the process will become more automated. "Part of this is just our industry and how it typically lacks in getting up to speed with new technology," he says.

Another example of online learning is KaplanCollege.com. More than 10,000 students have enrolled since April. The students pursue degrees such as bachelor of science in management, associate of science in applied management, bachelor's degree in criminal justice, Microsoft database administration certification and even law.

The site has spent more than $2 million on technology-from software development to servers to software-and has contracted with "a major" vendor to run a server farm for the college. Kaplan officials did not release details on administration of the server farm. The servers-about a half-dozen of them, including a back-up server-run on Windows, says president Bill Rosenthal.

The simplest site is the best, Rosenthal says. A browser with standard pre-loaded media is generally fine. "I'm a big believer in building the site around best of need instead of best of breed," he says. "You don't have to be at the bleeding edge. Assume you've got nothing but the standard browser."

Kaplan made its name in preparing people for tests. The Internet has had impact in this realm, as well. The rationale is the same: It's difficult to get people together-and now the technology exists to sometimes make that unnecessary. "They are people who are really really crunched for time," says KapTest.com general manager Sharon Miller, explaining the customers the site attracts.

Miller described the applications KapTest uses as "in between" books and a live classroom. There are online interactive lessons as well as static reading assignments-in addition to 24-hour customer or student service available via the Web, she says. Indeed, the Internet is likely to dilute the definition of what constitutes a school. "Previously, people had to gather at very specific places at very specific times to gather information," says Bill Rosenthal, president of KaplanCollege.com, which grants online academic degrees and continuing education. "The university defined when I was able to go study in the library. Now the library is open 24 hours a day."

Tracking data

Teaching, of course, is the first thing that comes to mind when the educational system and the Internet is considered. Increasingly, however, educators are turning to online services as a way to track student performance. Tools such as data warehousing and data mining, they find, are valuable ways to measure educational progress.

Companies such as IBM offer services to help school districts sift through data accumulated in stovepiped legacy systems and paper files- and turn it into usable information.

"Typically, districts are information-poor and very data-rich," says Jane Lockett, principal for IBM's global services in business intelligence and education. With a warehouse in place, school officials can look at broad patterns in educational performance or even drill down to the individual student or teacher level, though the warehouses typically will not hold the minutiae of daily homework grades, she says.

Large school districts, such as Gwinnett County in the Atlanta area, Broward County in the Fort Lauderdale, Fla., area and Clark County encompassing Las Vegas are adopting data technologies to the tune of millions of dollars. Gwinnett County, for example, is half- way through a three-year, $11 million data warehousing project, according to a county official.

This summer, Gwinnett County completed the third phase of a project geared toward using data warehousing to gauge student performance. The new release stores data on students' performance on standardized tests such as the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test (PSAT), the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and the Gateway Test, as well as student performance in programs such as English as a second language (ESL).

Data warehouses with mining tools can do a lot. They can decipher which student demographic excels or fails in certain topics, which teachers' students excel, how many teachers are working outside their area of expertise and how well ESL students do on the American College Test (ACT) test, says Jim Woolen, CIO for Gwinnett County Public Schools.

Warehousing and mining the data takes some of the guesswork out of running a school, Woolen says. "When you put it into a data warehouse, you can start tracking trends," Woolen says. It also is quicker sending a request to a county programmer who might have to sort through data in several systems to reach the pertinent information, he says.

Business-type thinking for schools makes sense, says Nancy Stewart, an analyst who follows data warehousing for Survey.com. "What they are faced with in their own organizations is in a lot of ways not different from what's faced in a business organization," she says.

Universities have been the educational institutions that have used data warehousing the most, says Stewart. "Data on data warehousing usage from elementary and secondary educational institutions is scarce, certainly not large enough to be statistically valid, which I think is telling in itself," Stewart says.

The benefits of the Internet are not limited to the classroom. A host of e-procurement portals-especially aimed at the K-12 market- are cropping up to give administrators access to more than e-mail and news. School systems are moving slowly, however, toward hubs, which include eschoolmall.com, Epylon Corp. and Simplexis.com.

The portals often charge a commission to vendors. In the case of Simplexis.com, a school district pays the company $1,000 a year for an unlimited number of users. Simplexis.com, meanwhile, charges the vendor a commission between 2 percent and 5 percent.

Meanwhile, at portal eschoolmall.com vendors pay a flat $5 fee per transaction-a potentially pricey fee for smaller purchase orders.

But the savings could be huge. A school and its suppliers can spend up to $200 handling the paperwork of a routine purchase, big or small. Web procurement can speed up the process.

The portals aim is not limited to moving transactions online. Epylon aims to use the Internet to automate the workflow surrounding the purchase of goods, says products vice president Ted Murguia. A Web portal could encompass the research of products, the internal approval process, connectivity to suppliers and the tracking order status, Murguia says. "From the user's point of view, they are just going into a one-stop shop and buying what they need," says Amar Singh, CEO of Simplexis.com, the portal company chaired by former U.S. Education Secretary and presidential candidate Lamar Alexander.

But the emerging e-procurement portals for the education market might not be mature enough to satisfy users. The Glendale Unified School District in California is testing a variety of portals, including Epylon and Simplexis, says Patrick Kennedy, the district's director of purchasing and stores. "None of these companies are far enough along yet where there's a clear-cut leader," he says.

He sounds like he can't wait for the portals to mature. "We've had 15 or 16 people touching all this stuff. We've killed off a couple of trees," he says, explaining that the traditional paper-based purchasing process pales next to the "speed-of-light" process of using the Internet.

The education market is ripe for portals, says Derrick Dominique, an analyst who follows e-marketplaces for the Hurwitz Group. "It's a very inefficient, highly fragmented vertical with many suppliers," he says. Indeed, schools buy from thousands of companies, and they buy a wide variety of products-lightbulbs, phones, copiers, fax machines, computers, food, construction services, furniture, art supplies, musical instruments, carpet and myriad other things.

Automating the vast procurement process for school districts could lead to great cost savings, Dominique says. "The education vertical has an opportunity here to generate cost savings which in turn can be reinvested back into the education system," says Dominique, who estimated cost savings for schools using portals at 10 percent to 15 percent.

"For many universities, it can be very low cost entry-in some cases, no cost entry-based on the amount of business they'll send through," says Tom Deise, leader of the higher-education practice for Andersen Consulting in the United States. Andersen incorporates Epylon technology in work it does for schools.

Onward and upward

In the end, the educational institutions will have to keep one concept in mind when it comes to applying the Internet as a tool to transform their field: get smart. "The goal is to improve student achievement," says Rae Ann Alton, worldwide K-12 segment manager for IBM.

Accountability is key, and using the Internet to monitor objectives is smart, she says. "School districts around the United States are very focused on accountability," she says. "What are the standards, the objectives that we want students to learn? How do you make sure that those standards are consistently implemented down to the classroom level?"

IBM's Learning Village Internet-based tool is a standards database for schools. Standards-specifically, education standards-might include details on which types of math problems a student should be able to solve before moving on to the next level, as well as measurements and metrics for what constitutes successful performance in a subject.

Teachers then go online to create lesson plans tied to the specific standards. They can also access a "resources" database to find books, videos or activities to supplement the lesson plan. And teachers can share lesson plans online, offering a shortcut for other teachers.

Using the Internet to support education is still new, though. "We're seeing schools start to engage in a lot of e-commerce activities," says John Bailey, director of educational technology for the Pennsylvania Department of Education. "And this is really new for schools. What we're seeing is a complete transformation of the administration within these schools."

Schools have focused more on using the Internet as an administrative than as a learning tool, he says. "For the past decade, all the attention has been focused on how do we use technology to improve instruction," Bailey says.

That may be changing. Pennsylvania now uses the Internet and related technology to do both. It gives students access to material and buttresses educational administration. The system presents computerized assessments and calculates which skills a student needs to work on. It feeds the data back to the teacher so she knows which students need help, and in what areas.

Vendors see an opportunity and are moving in. For instance, Carnegie Learning Systems' Cognitive Learning Tutor uses artificial intelligence technology developed at Carnegie Mellon University. There are others. The state maintains a list of about 30 technology providers that it recommends schools use in state-sponsored initiatives.

Pennsylvania plans to use the Internet to pool basic purchasing needs. Purchasing based on this pooling will be done at e- procurement portals' reverse auction sites, Bailey says.

The transformation is just beginning. "In most cases, it's going to cut some steps out [of the business of education]," Bailey says. "And we think that's great, because it's making schools more efficient, and it's making government more efficient."

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Copyright 2000 CMP Media Inc.