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RWSL Distributed Network (RDN) Scaling and Sustainability Model

 

 

Section 1. Guidance on scaling use of remote labs across all institutions collaborating in NANSLO Lab infrastructure required for replication is defined. Replication of BC lab in CO has started. RWSL scheduling and scale capacity templates are developed.

 

1. RDN Scaling
1. Define RWSL Distributed Network (RDN)
2. Template
3. Policies and Procedures
4. Regional organizations of academic institutions to coordinate/contribute/maintain laboratory resources

 

Section 2. Sustainability Model

 

1. Sustainability model
1. Management
2. Costs
3. Potential Revenue Sources
4. Faculty organization to develop and refine experiments
5. RWSL Tech Network
6. Tech staff/support contracts to operate and maintain equipment

 

 

Potential for ongoing role of inter-institutional faculty discipline panels as sustainable model for open course-ware design and development has been established. Need to define partnership opportunities for a North American federated network of institutions.

Need to design cost effective sustainability business model.

 

The scale network template provides guidance on scaling use of remote labs across all institutions collaborating in NANSLO as well as a sustainability model. The template will define what is involved with incorporating additional institutions into NANSLO so that labs may be shared across the member colleges and universities, reducing costs of labs for individual institutions while increasing their capacity to serve more students.

Essentially the Scale Network Template is a kind of business and academic model for achieving our vision of a "North American Network of Science Labs Online."

 

 

 

Document End

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Input: Everyone, please insert anything you think I should include or any pertinent comments in the comments at the bottom of this document.  I will incorporate them into this section when I write it.  Thanks!

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---------------------------------------------------------- Notes below this line are from 2011 -------------------------------------------------------

Some Notes about Scaling:

Some Comments from Paul Re Scaling

Here's a few thoughts on how to scale NANSLO.
I think eventually NANSLO will need to establish a shared development environment that all nodes can use to develop and test experiments.
Once experiments have been tested and optimized in the development environment then they can be distributed for deployment to production environments at all nodes wanting to use that experiment. Production environments can be located at a wide variety of locations - sub-modules for specific experiments may be distributed across multiple institutions.

 

Note – see Chap 14, Moving the Laboratory Online

 

 

Some notes about Sustainability Model:

 

Regarding the sustainability model in the proposal we said:

"CCCS anticipates covering costs for ongoing technical support and maintenance of the equipment in the RWSL labs, e.g., licensing, maintenance and upgrading of computers and equipment. To cover these costs, CCCS will include them in its budget supported by tuition and fees. To expand NANSLO beyond the life of the project, WICHE would charge a NANSLO membership fee for participating institutions. Initially, it is envisioned that this fee would provide member institutions with information on a NANSLO Web site about the use of these labs, access to a schedule for reserving time and conducting experiments at various labs on the network, and the capacity to share expertise via the discipline communities for the introductory biology, chemistry and physics courses. NANSLO might also provide training workshops for institutions for a fee. As expertise and interest grows in RWSL resulting in more NANSLO members and more disciplines using RWSL in multiple course levels, the NANSLO budget would grow and WICHE would use that funding to hire the additional staff support needed."

 

Notes from Dan on Scaling:  Currently, we do not know the effective radius of accessibility for the RWSl.  How far from Denver will students be able to access the lab?  We know that distance is a factor, but we don't know what kind of distance limitations we are dealing with.  As soon as we have a node established in Denver, we need to test access from a variety of distances from the lab.  We have a similar unknown quantity in terms of required bandwidth.  This is something that must be established by experimentation as well, because we will most likely need to restrict use of the RWSL to students who have the minimum technical requirements for establishing a connection - once we figure out what those requirements are.

 

Note from Ron:

I favor a distributed network with a relatively low initial buy in cost.  To this end we need to identify what the minimum hardware and software requirements are for an institution who wants to join the NANSLO network and be able to serve its services out to other institutions.  I also expect that once we have our nodes in Colorado (Dan, where in Colorado will this be?) and Courtenay established and able to serve there will be institutions that desire service, but that do not have any RWSL capability as yet.  It will be important to encourage them to develop serving capability so I've begun to think we should establish a fee for service structure for institutions requiring RWSL services.  This fee schedule should be reduced proportionately as institutions establish RWSL nodes of their own and begin serving the wider community.  An institution that serves the wider network more will pay less for the RWSL services it receives.  At some point the fee for service should be reduced to zero or near zero if the institution is serving the network with a predetermined number of nodes.  We’ll have to look at this more closely to determine what the initial fee level should be for a non-serving institution and how it will incrementally decrease as the institution begins to serve the network more.  It seems to me (at the moment) that the drop for the first node should be sizable and fee drops for subsequent nodes from the same institution should be proportionately less.  This will encourage institutions to get involved in at least a small way.  That's not extremely well thought out yet, but let’s think about this more and see what we can come up with.