CURRENT NEWS

RECENT NEWS

ARCHIVE

IBM/Friday Institute Overview

IBM is partnering with the Friday Institute to deliver in-classroom material, like educational videos, demonstrations and lab experiment modules, to enhance the learning experience for thousands of students in North Carolina. This on-demand approach allows teachers to easily tap into valuable resources that are managed by the Friday Institute over the Internet – when they need it.

IBM is providing the technology foundation for this solution at North Carolina State University, through Shared University Research (SUR) and other awards, as well as IBM software through the company’s Academic Initiative.

“Through our long-standing partnership with N.C. State, we were able to collectively create this innovative, and easy-to-use solution that expands the resources available to our state’s teachers and students," said Sue Horn, IBM vice president and site executive of the Software Group in RTP. “This project shows how both IBM software and hardware can be used to enhance the learning experience, thereby helping to foster math and science skills, to ensure the next generation of students are prepared when they enter the job market.”

In its outreach efforts to the state’s poorest school districts, the Friday Institute will take advantage of IBM BladeCenter servers that are part of the campus Virtual Computing Lab, using WebSphere and Tivoli software technology to manage their solution. With this innovative solution, high school students in their science lab can access everything they will need from their computer to perform a scheduled experiment, from instructional material and video demos, to the probeware that they will need to conduct the experiment. And all of the material used by the students can be stored on IBM blade servers housed at the NCSU Friday Institute, with the process managed and maintained automatically by IBM software. NCSU faculty are able to provide remote students with the most advanced educational material, while minimizing the cost to already strained county resources.

Through an IBM Shared University Research (SUR) award, the Friday Institute received 30 BladeCenter servers to explore how a centralized computing cluster, the Virtual Computer Lab, coupled with an extended services-oriented architecture (SOA) could be better used to serve K-12 education in North Carolina. This SOA model will be applied beyond the NCSU campus to facilitate collaboration and deliver services to schools throughout North Carolina. The Friday Institute will use IBM WebSphere software to develop a portal to provide Internet-based access to resources and services, and will integrate data provided from IBM Tivoli Monitoring with data collected via onsite interviews and observations at schools and with portal usability testing data to conduct research in learning modes and outcomes.

About IBM SUR Awards:

IBM's highly-selective Shared University Research program awards computing equipment (servers, storage systems, personal computing products, etc.) to institutions of higher education around the world to facilitate research projects in areas of mutual interest including: the architecture of business and processes, privacy and security, supply chain management, information based medicine, deep computing, Grid Computing, Autonomic Computing, and storage solutions. The SUR awards also support the advancement of university projects by connecting top researchers in academia with IBM researchers, along with representatives from product development and solution provider communities. IBM supports over 50 SUR awards per year worldwide.

About IBM:

IBM is the world's largest information technology company, with 80 years of leadership in helping businesses innovate. Drawing on resources from across IBM and key business partners, IBM offers a wide range of services, solutions and technologies that enable companies to take full advantage of the on demand era. For more information about IBM, visit http://www.ibm.com.