Dubai Men's College drives new concept of 'on-demand' learning

Whilst still in its preparation stage, the infrastructure will allow DMC's 2,300 students access to advanced educational technology and help position the college as an e-learning pioneer in the Gulf. The project is underpinned by Dubai Municipality as part of its investment in driving network enabled education in the Emirate and its long standing relationship with IBM.

"This is a very exciting project for us as the possibilities are endless. With this superior infrastructure in hand, Dubai Men's College is set to be a premiere choice for students with educational facilities that will allow them to experience the significant benefits of e-learning," said Dr Bill Vega, Director of Dubai Men's College. "It will transform the way our students learn and work with each other."

The campus will feature some of the latest technologies that enable new and advanced methods of learning, including the region's first online facility that allows students to download video clips of various classroom lectures through Video-on-Demand technology. This system provides students an option where they can choose to run the lectures 'offline', after downloading the file onto their computers. The infrastructure will also support video conferencing facilities that allow professors to conduct their lectures and interact with students without being physically present in classrooms.

"Dubai Municipality is delighted to be backing this project particularly as it involves one of the country's leading educational institutions changing the way students work and learn today. Building this important platform on IBM technology means that we can be assured that we are deploying best practice systems with the benefit of IBM's global expertise and the vision we've seen from them on building their on-demand strategy," said Abdel Redha Abul Hassan, Manager of Projects Department, Dubai Municipality.

"Dubai Municipality is focused on driving innovation and adoption of technology in all aspects of life in Dubai. We see this initiative as an important step for bringing on-demand concepts to benefit education."

As part of the project, IBM Global Services will be setting up a wireless network across the campus that will enable online access and give students the choice to plug in and work on their laptops any time they want. DMC's e-learning capabilities will also extend to archiving library books online so that students can extract the information they need instantly while they are in their classrooms or outside.

"The education system as a whole is evolving radically. Technology has brought about the concept of e-learning and DMC is adopting this concept to reap many incentives for students and faculty alike. With this project, DMC can serve as an educational model to its peers in the region and raise the benchmark of both curricula and educational services," said Samer Shaar, General Manager of IBM Middle East, Egypt and Pakistan. " IBM has a profound commitment to the region's education sector as it continues to work closely with schools, colleges and universities and provide the technology and expertise that will empower people and transform the way they work, play and learn."

Set to be ready for the new academic year starting in September 2004, IBM Global Services will be managing the complete migration and integration of this wide-scale turnkey project, while some of its business partners will be providing the data networking components of the total implementation. IBM was selected following an extensive evaluation process on finding the partner that could best provide an open, portable, secure and scalable solution that would be easy and simple to use and allow DMC full control and management of the whole system.

"We are very pleased to be working with IBM for this endeavour, as it's been able to meet all our requirements and has a track record of providing some of the most advanced e-learning infrastructures both globally and across the region," said Anas El Jamal, IT Manager at Dubai Men's College.

The make-up of this modern IT backbone, which will be supported by a Nortel-based networking environment, includes over 35 IBM eServer xSeries systems, a fully integrated enterprise management system using IBM's Tivoli enterprise software and Perigrine Helpdesk solution, an IBM TotalStorage Storage Area Network (SAN), an IBM Network Attached Storage Solution (NAS) system, an IBM TotalStorage UltraScalable Tape Library (LTO) and sophisticated IBM digital media technologies (developed at IBM's Technology Development Centre in Cairo) that incorporate an open and standards-based framework to digitally manage, store, protect and distribute video, audio and images across the DMC network.

The implementation of the network will be executed in two phases, with the first phase incorporating the integration of the networking equipment, the wireless network and server systems that will support the whole infrastructure, manage Internet access and e-mails and manage high bandwidth applications such as video and audio. IBM will then proceed to the second phase by deploying 'classroom' technologies that will support the online multimedia library and video conferencing capabilities through the use of IBM ThinkCentre desktops and ThinkPad notebooks that incorporate unique wireless and other patented IBM ThinkVantage technologies.

DMC will also set up an on-campus Help Desk where IBM-trained staff will provide year-round information to DMC's more than 2000 students and 200 faculty staff on the different aspects of the system and address any questions they may have in migrating to the new e-learning environment.