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Project Description
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The campuses of Southeast Community College are located in the three most mountainous counties of far-southeastern Kentucky - Harlan, Letcher, and Bell. Being underserved by telecommunications interests in both the private and public sectors, SECC began in the early 1990s to develop free-standing ITV and distance-learning capacities and to seek partnerships with regional and state-level networks.
SECC is now a member of two videoconferencing networks: CenterNet, a network based and maintained by the Rural Development Center in Somerset,; and KTLN, a network of universities, technical colleges and community colleges provided by the state of Kentucky. Participating in these networks, however, revealed that we needed to develop our own programming and dissemination capabilities to fully meet the needs of our administration, faculty, staff, and service area. With support from the Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE), SECC is constructing a state-of-the-art Telecommunications Center on its Cumberland (Harlan County) campus that will serve as the hub for an Eastern Kentucky Education (Telelinking) Network, a three-county interactive video-production, networking, and broadcast system, and provide a laboratory for students seeking an associate degree or transfer credentials in broadcast technology and for classroom instructors and others who need training in using distance learning technologies.
Before receiving the FIPSE funding, SECC had three heavily utilized distance learning classrooms, one at each of our three campuses. In addition to the studio/production facility funding, this grant has allowed for expansion to two classrooms on each campus and to provide educational access cable connections to Bell, Letcher and Harlan counties, and to various high schools within the tri-county service area.
The Eastern Kentucky Telelinking Network and Telecommunications Training Laboratory is now headquartered in remodeled space in Falkenstine Hall on the Cumberland Campus. The new studio/production facility is now installed and fully operational and most technical positions are filled. The entire Cumberland campus has now been re-wired to Enhanced CAT-5 capacity.
Fifteen videoconferencing courses and five videotaped courses were offered during the Spring 2000 semester; we anticipate that more than forty courses will be offered during the 2000-2001 academic year to the three campus sites [Cumberland, Middlesboro and Whitesburg], as well as to other community colleges near SECC's service area.
With the forthcoming installation of new routers and switchers, classrooms, conference rooms, and offices on all three campuses will be networked one-to-another, to their respective community's school and cable systems, and more reliably incorporated into the State-of-Kentucky's KTLN.