Picture the island’s teachers colleges connected to each other by a sophisticated wireless network. Trainees in all of the colleges are linked via live video and audio conferencing, and can take courses offered at another college without physically leaving theirs.

Imagine that these training colleges are linked, by the same network, to hundreds of primary and secondary schools across the island, giving trainee and trained teachers a chance to view live classroom sessions; primary and secondary school teachers are able to log onto the vast human and material resources of the colleges.

If you visualised these two scenarios, then you would only have captured a fraction of the huge vision of Professor Errol Miller and Luke Jackson of the Joint Board of Teacher Education (JBTE).

Their vision became a reality on Wednesday when the JBTE, after years of experimenting, officially launched its latest multimedia technology, EDUCOM, a wireless network built from part of a $5.5-million grant from USAID.

The grant is part of a President George W Bush Initiative, announced at the 2001 Summit of the Americas, to establish Centres of Excellence for Teacher Training (CETT) across Latin America and the Caribbean. At these centres, educators are trained to teach reading using best practices and to improve the reading performance of primary aged students.

According to Dr Kevin Rushing, the deputy director of the USAID Mission in Jamaica, the Caribbean-based CETT is one of three Centres of Excellence that have been established in the Hemisphere. The others are in Central and South America respectively.

As a practical demonstration of its special features, Wednesday’s EDUCOM launch was carried out simultaneously at five separate locations – the Ministry of Education, Youth and Culture (MOEYC), St Joseph’s College, the JBTE at the UWI’s Mona campus, Mico Teachers College and Northern Caribbean University (NCU).

To Miller, EDUCOM, which will eventually link colleges across the Caribbean, effectively changing the course of teacher training forever, is a literal dream come true.

“For those who have been constantly criticising the education system, saying ‘it can’t be business as usual, it has to be new and different’ we are actually doing the new and different. We are actually showing you what 21st century education is going to become,” he told the Sunday Observer.

EDUCOM, he said, has three main components:

. a multimedia hub;

. a wireless backbone which currently links JBTE to Coopers Hill and from Coopers Hill to Juan de Bolas to Northern Caribbean University (NCU) and eventually will go from NCU to Bethlehem Teachers College; and

. a point to multipoint connection which at the moment links three colleges – Mico Teachers College, St Joseph’s Teachers College and the Edna Manley School of the Visual and Performing Arts to the system. Six primary schools in the corporate area are also connected. They are St Francis, Alpha, Holy Family, Clan Carthy, Ormsby Hall and Mountain View.

The plan, says Miller is to extend the link to Bethlehem, CASE, Moneague and Sam Sharpe colleges which will be hubs with links to primary schools across the island.

According to Miller, some of the benefits to the education system will include:

. Enabling audio and video conferencing between institutions linked to the network;

. Facilitating broadcast or scheduled and loop programmes over at least four channels simultaneously;

. Allowing voice over Internet Providers for all institutions, thus improving communication;

. Aggregate internet demand to allow colleges more affordable access to the internet and to web-based publications such as on-line Interactive Libraries, Distance

Teaching and web-based training material and streaming multi-media clips;

. High-speed transmission of data that will allow local LANs and individual computers to be managed from a central location;

. Facilitating video capture of classes being taught in schools and the archiving of these classes for later viewing or broadcasting and

. Connection to cable channels.

Education Minister Maxine Henry Wilson lauded the state-of-the-art wireless Wide Area Network (WAN) as a welcome investment that was critical to improving the quality of teacher training courses and its delivery.

“Constantly we talk about the need for more resources, but perhaps the resources that we do not sufficiently use is that of partnership and collaboration and here we have an example of how colleges working together can optimise the resources that they have, perhaps equally as important, the resources that others have can be brought into the loop,” she said.

Mico’s principal Dr Claude Packer supported her sentiments.

“As a teacher you believe in creative ways to enhance learning. We are going to make sure as a group of colleges that the system works, because it can work,” he said.

Inside the crowded JBTE conference room last Wednesday, there was a single television screen, split five ways, which allowed viewers to see and hear participants speaking in the other sites.

There was, however, one minor glitch: unexpected disruptions in the audio and video quality at some of the sites, which, according to Miller, did not occur during the testing prior to the launch. But after the launch he told the Sunday Observer that the problem was identified and cleared up.

For the future, maximum sustainability and effective usage may depend on local funding as the US contribution will not be enough to facilitate links to all the institutions which may want to participate.

In the meantime, the system is receiving local and international support. Cable and Wireless Jamaica Foundation is providing computers at subsidised costs to 18 primary schools in the project and is helping the JBTE develop on-line courses for student teachers to improve their written and oral language skills.

Microsoft is offering licensed copies of its products at nominal cost to the colleges and schools and is proposing to utilise the facility to set up a Microsoft Academy to train teachers in the use of its products.

The Jamaican government has licensed the network. The Spectrum Authority assisted in the experimenting stage and has granted the necessary licence to operate the Wireless WAN linking UWI to NCU and member colleges.

Help has also come from the RJR/TVJ Group and the Jamaica Constabulary Force who allowed JBTE to co-locate radios and antennae on their towers at strategic sites. In addition, the Michigan-based ProQuest, which is the largest provider of on-line databases and journals in the world, is offering access to five of its databases so the colleges in the system can receive up-to-date material to support their courses.