Alexander D. Ivannikov
General Director
Information Systems Research Institute of Russia
First Vice President
Association for International Education
E-mail: adi@isrir.msk.su
Peter T. Knight
Chief
Pilot Electronic Media Center
The World Bank
E-mail: pknight@worldbank.org
Revised version of Paper Prepared for the NATO Advanced Workshop on Networking in the NIS: Establishing a Cooperative Framework for Networking in Russia and Other NATO Partners, Teaching Center "Golitsyno", Moscow Oblast, Russia, 29 September - 1 October, 1994. The authors wish to thank Alexander Galitsky, Vladimir Kashitsin, Uri Bar-Zemer, Gary Tydings, Mikhail Shamolin, and George McGurn for helpful comments on earlier drafts. The responsibility for the contents of the paper, however, is that of the authors, and should not be attributed to their organizations.
Our basic point is simple: in union there is strength; what is difficult and expensive to do alone, can be done much more cheaply and successfully together.
There are ample technological resources available in Russia and other states of the former Soviet Union to build a technologically advanced distance education system, relying on satellite teleconferencing and electronic networks linked to the Internet, backed up by conventional training and broadcast educational television. There is an urgent need for such a system to make available throughout the FSU the limited training capacity existing today in these countries to provide training in key market- economy skills which are needed but in short supply: enterprise management in market conditions, accounting, banking, and public finance to name the most critical.
Such a system would be used first and foremost to produce educational services for domestic markets. But it could also be used to import critical educational and technical services, and also to export such services in areas where Russia and other FSU states are at the leading edge of scientific and technological development, such as mathematics, physics, and material science. An added advantage of building such a system is that it would offer interesting possibilities for conversion of parts of the military-industrial-scientific complex to produce, install, and service the necessary equipment and facilities. And it could make Russia a world leader in the emerging global market for distance education services, which is likely to become one of the fastest growing sectors in the world economy, which is increasingly a knowledge-based economy requiring lifelong learning, not "terminal" education.
The principal problems involved in creating such a system are organizational and financial, not technical. There are many different initiatives currently under development in Russia, other FSU states, and NATO states which aspire to create elements of such a network. There is substantial foreign assistance potentially available, and a strong interest in the NATO countries and their new NATO Partners in encouraging such developments. But each of these initiatives, in our opinion, runs the risk of mobilizing insufficient financial resources and political support to achieve even its own often limited objectives, and almost none sees the development of such a broad system as we are proposing.
The solution to the specific problems of each initiative is to be more ambitions, to unite forces, and to create a general system which can serve academic, training, and commercial purposes simultaneously, include an element of cross-subsidization from the commercial to the academic and training elements, and yet provide both commercial and academic/training services at lower unit costs than could dedicated systems which many of the initiative we know about would create. In union there is strength, and also lower costs.
In this paper we explore this general thesis, relating it to known initiatives and financial resources.
In collaboration with a large group of Russian experts, the World Bank has over the past two years been working to prepare what is now known as the Management and Financial Training Project. The following three paragraphs draw on the analysis contained in the first part of the staff appraisal report for that project, which will be presented to the Bank's Board of Directors for approval in November, 1994. What we say about Russia here can apply as well to other NATO partners in the FSU and to a lesser extent to those in Eastern Europe.
The Russian government is in the process of making a massive, unprecedented shift from a command to a market economy. The requirements for such a change include restructuring most productive sectors completely, creating more service-oriented functions, establishing a labor market, and wholesale restructuring of the government's role. Experience elsewhere, however, has shown that economic reforms cannot be implemented adequately without trained human resources.
Russia has had little exposure to market activity, even compared to other central and Eastern European countries. Foreign investment and private domestic activity have been lower in Russia, the concentration of employment in the state system higher, and the period of command economy longer. Consequently, the basic market skills that are taken for granted in industrial countries and in many developing countries have been virtually nonexistent in Russia.
A successful transition to a market-based economy requires large numbers of people to be trained in completely new commercial, financial, and management skills. Millions of managers, entrepreneurs, and administrators are restructuring enterprises, creating small businesses, opening new banks, and transforming public finances and administration. This is creating an enormous and growing demand for market skills in many critical areas: particularly enterprise management, accounting and finance, and public finance.
The economic case for investment in such training has been set forth in some detail in Kapelushnikov et al (1993). Suffice it to say here, that to realize Russia's present comparative advantage in natural resources and high-technology industry/services as well as to rebuild its industrial and agricultural base, investment in the critical market-economy skills which are currently lacking is the missing ingredient. Because the complementary resources are already available, and because the Russian labor force is relatively well-educated, and knows how to learn, the investment in training of this existing labor force is one of the highest-return investments which can be made in Russia today.
But the number of institutions and individuals capable of teaching these skills available in Russia is limited. The best of them are also concentrated in only a few places, largely in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. With the vast expanse of Russia, spanning 11 time zones, there is a clear option: develop a distance education system, coupled with a training of trainers strategy to make the best use of the limited Russian resources in these fields, making them available for training in universities, training centers, and enterprises all over Russia. Since importation of foreign trainers is expensive and not always efficient, the distance education system should be developed in a way permitting the import of critical educational and training services, and these should be concentrated on the preparation of Russian trainers who know the culture, society, and languages and can therefore be more effective than foreigners in training. Uplinking the existing Russian "centers of excellence" via satellite to provide televised lectures, to be supplemented by support "on the ground" from graduates of the training of trainers programs which can be organized in these centers, and providing for interaction, feedback, and additional computer-based instruction over electronic networks. If a high-bandwidth Internet-based system can be built, there is the possibility of using World Wide Web servers and Mosaic as a basis for instruction which can include graphics, video, and sound as well as hypertext. But even with simpler Email-based systems a great deal is possible, especially if intelligent teaching programs are built into local nodes in the system.
Systems such as this were discussed at the First International Conference on Distance Education in Russia in July 1994 (ICDED'94). There is a wealth of foreign experience and domestic proposals contained in the papers published in the Proceedings of this important conference (see especially Johnson, Utsumi, and Ivannikov, 1994 and Knight, 1994).
There are many other needs which could be met by a distance education system of the kind we are proposing. The same network could be used to develop business contacts between Russian and other FSU enterprise, and between these and foreign partners in trade and investment. It could be used to support the process of conversion to civilian production of the military-industrial-scientific complexes on both sides of the Cold War. And the production of equipment and services to build and operate such a system could provide direct economic opportunities to enterprises previously producing for military purposes (see Galitsky et al., 1994).
While ideas for building such a Russian distance education system are not in short supply, in the current chaotic political and financial situation, organization and finance are proving the limiting factors.
We list below some of the initiatives of which we are aware, and the rough order of magnitude of the resources envisioned as being available. Our basic thesis is networks become more valuable to each user, and have lower costs, the more users there are. Therefore, while some or all of the proposed initiatives could come to fruition alone, their costs are likely to be higher, and their value to the users less, than if these initiatives were united into the development of a more general multiple-use network.
World Bank Russia Management and Financial Training Project. The total funding envisioned for this project is US$50 million, of which $40 million would come from a World Bank Loan. The project essentially sets up a project selection and financing mechanism, and provides an initial endowment for that mechanism, named the National Training Foundation (NTF) (established 7 September 1994). The Chairman of the NTF's Board of Directors, which includes representatives of both governmental and non- governmental organizations, is Sergey A. Vasiliev, Deputy Minister of Economy. The project as it currently stands post appraisal and prior to formal negotiations and approval by the World Bank's Board of Directors would run for two years, and finance, through competitive selection of projects submitted by Russian juridical persons, training in three key areas: management development; accounting, auditing, and finance; and public finance as well as a limited number of pilot projects (intended to prepare the way for a second project) in such areas as small business, banking, public administration, and market economics education for the general public through the mass media. The use of distance education as a means of delivering training is explicitly recognized for all kinds of training envisaged for the project, and funds would be made available to establish a distance training support center to help interested Russian training institutions develop and execute training delivery by modern distance education techniques. There is thus a considerable sum of resources potentially available for production of distance training services, but not much for developing the needed electronic infrastructure. And whether the resources of the NTF are actually used for electronic distance training as opposed to conventional training will depend on the bringing the potential suppliers of distance training technology and services into contact with specific training institutions and motivating them to use these services.
Federal University Network of Russia (RUNNet). Vasiliev et al. (1994) describe the Federal University Network of Russia in a paper prepared for the NATO workshop. Plans for a fiber optics and satellite- based distance education system linking over 100 Russian Universities by 1997, and is based on a multiprotocol federal backbone with 11 regional segments. RUNNet development is led by Saint Petersburg Technical University of Fine Mechanics and Optics (Project Leader Vladimir Nicolaevich Vasiliev), and includes Moscow State University as well as universities in Novosibirsk, Ekatirinburg, Krasnoyarsk, Saratov, and Ulianovsk in the first stage of the project. Begun in 1994 under the Universities of Russia program (linking more than 100 universities (both classical and technical) throughout Russia, RUNNet seeks to provide Russian universities with common network services: electronic mail, electronic library systems, distributed information searching systems, data banks and knowledge bases, electronic seminars, on-line teleconferences, etc. Core federal nodes located in Saint Petersburg and Moscow are key parts of the backbone, and almost all backbone administration and channel control will take place at these nodes. Current plans provide for fiber optic line connections from Saint Petersburg connecting with NORDUNet in Helsinki, to be extended to Moscow, and a major uplink to the rest of Russia from Moscow State University using the Raduga 85 satellite and groundstations at all federal and some regional nodes in the system. It would provide Russian universities with access to the Internet, facilitating information exchange between Russian and foreign universities. Funding for this project is coming from the State Committee on Higher Education -- approximately US$4.5 million at the present time.
Regional University Scientific North-West Network (RUS NWNet). Borisov et al. (1994) presented a paper at the NATO Workshop describing plans for a network linking a number of Saint Petersburg Universities and research institutions and others in the Northwestern region of Russia, in a regional network linked to RUNNet and RELARN, among others. RUS NWNet includes a fiber optic link to Helsinki and a substantial fiber ring within Saint Petersburg. This project seeks to establish a consistent regional policy of computer networks development optimize regional telecommunication system development. The Director of RUS NWNet is N.V. Borisov.
Russian Electronic Academic and Research Network (RELARN). RELARN is a Russian association of academic and research institutions, supported by the Ministry of Science and Technical Policy and the Committee on Higher Education of the Russian Federation. It's President is Academician Spartak Belyaev. RELARN provides subsidies for academic users of all Russian Email networks, but more than 90 percent of the subsidized Email addresses are RELCOM addresses. RELARN could provide the electronic infrastructure for a Russian distance education network. The subsidy amounts to about US$60,000, but is taken advantage of only by a limited number of Russian institutions of higher education. Exceptions outside of Moscow and Saint Petersburg are Novosibirsk and Dubna.
Economic Development Institute of the World Bank (EDI). EDI currently spends on the order of $8 million a year in support of market- oriented training through a network of joint training centers established in FSU states (largely in universities and training institutes), initially Belarus, Khazakstan, Russia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. Some of these centers plus another in Beijing conduct preliminary course for the Joint Vienna Institute, an institutions in Vienna, Austria, established jointly by the International Monetary Fund, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the European Union, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the World Bank, and the Bank for International Settlements. To date all EDI training has been using a training of trainers strategy to train local trainers, but using conventional training techniques. EDI is looking at the possibilities of using distance education techniques, but has balked at the high cost of establishing a network for its own use. The Director of EDI is Vinod Thomas.
We understand that US West is interested in developing a distance education system for training its own Russian personnel and suppliers for its joint venture Russian projects. Again, cost of establishing a private network seems to be the major factor holding back execution, and US West has approached the World Bank and the UNet project regarding possible collaboration on joint project.
This ambitious project seeks to use a variety of Russian satellites to build a global distance education network with three key groundstations in Tobolsk, Siberia, Russia; McClelland, Iowa, USA; and Taiyuan, Yellow River, China. The Executive Director of SCOLA Russia is Alexander Kostelyev, who participated in the NATO workshop. Financing for this project is not clear at this point. This network could provide for the international and domestic transmission of educational television and teleconferences, as well as carry Internet traffic.
A group of universities (headed by Tambov Technical University) and local administrations in Central Russia (e.g. Ryzan, Voronesh,Kursk, Oryol) have a project to develop high bandwidth telecommunications system capable of full Internet service, supplemented by lower bandwidth extensions for EMail to smaller centers. This project would be 50 percent financed from the budget of the State Committee on Higher Education, and 50 percent from local administration's resources.
With support from the US Department of Energy, a group of nuclear research institutes in the CIS and the United States seek to develop a network for business development and training. In the first stage of this program, high bandwidth Internet and teleconferencing connections would be established between three Defense Programs laboratories in the United States (Sandia, Los Alamos, and Lawrence Livermore) to an initial set of three sites, Arzamas 16, Chilabinsk 70, and a location in Moscow not yet determined, which would be the hub from which to begin to expand the telecommunications capability in the next phase to the Moscow area. The basic objectives of the program are set forth in the Stabilization Partnerships Program established in Section 575 of the Foreign Appropriations Act: stabilization employs the human element and facilitates the transition of technology from weapons development to commercial activities; partnering provides a quick and low-cost (when compared to travel costs between the US and the CIS) means to manage activities between the participating entities; and education enables the resources of the academic communities to participate in the education of future business and technical leaders in a market-driven economy.
This project is being developed by in the United States by a group of institutions led by San Diego State University. This project envisions the development of a network of Economic Development Centers in the FSU states, initially probably in Russia and the Kyrgyz Republic, which would use satellite-based teleconferencing and audiographic techniques to serve both educational and commercial purposes. The commercial purposes include business incubation and promotion of foreign investment, and the educational purposes are similar in conception to the World Bank project. James Cary is the Acting Director of the Project, and he has assembled a group of private investors who are considering an initial investment on the order of $2 million in a first stage.
This project links some 30 training centers, mostly in Russia (largely outside of Moscow), but including a few in other FSU states. Its headquarters are in Moscow, and it involves activities in four areas: training of businesspeople, entrepreneurs, demobilized military personnel, the unemployed, and municipal government personnel in business administration; business consultancies, largely to small businesses but not excluding large enterprises undergoing privatization; access to loan and equity capital from Russian banks and Western sources participating in the project, (there are currently some 25 investment projects underway selected from a much larger number of proposals); and development of an information network involving data interchange and potentially distance education. This last area is currently under development and envisages the use of existing networks and communications facilities for Email, bulletin boards, and the like. Funding for the next two years is on the order of $40 million from a variety of sources including USAID (the lead funder), Russian private sector organizations, and European and Japanese bilateral sources coordinated by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). The General Manager of the project is the former Dean of Boston University's Business School, George McGurn, and his First Deputy is Miroslav Nikoruk.
Recent contacts with top officials at this ministry revealed that the Ministry is interested in making use of a distance education system as well as conventional training for its own personnel all over Russia. Both Russia-based and foreign-based training are of interest.
This project, led by Valeri Vasilievich Popov, provides an electronic communications network and develops databases on institutions of higher education and useful to them which are accessible through the network. Its funding is from the Committee on Higher Education is about US$200,000.
In a paper presented at the ICDED94, Galitsky et al. (1994) presented a proposal for developing a distance education system for Russia starting with networks inside satellite towns such as Zelenograd, Troisk, Akademgorodok, Sosnovyi Bohr, Petergouph and many others and then connecting these towns to each other and to the Russian and global Internet. These towns were centers of the military-industrial-scientific complex, and high-level technical personnel, a large number of new startup enterprises headed by scientists and engineers lacking experience in management in market economy conditions, and the potential to help build a Russian distance education system. TCP/IP and wireless access are the key technologies for these satellite-town networks. Elvis+ started a pilot project in Zelenograd and on the basis of its own and partners' (Sun Microsystems and Module) investments, built a 2 Mbps line between Moscow and Zelenograd. Internet access is available now for all telephone users, including cellular phone users (Beline system, VimpelCom company). Elvis+ wireless technology, which will give low cost and high speed Internet access will be available to users from March 1995. This network has the name OpenNet.com. The CEO and Chairman of the Board of Elvis+ is Alexander Galitsky.
Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts and San Diego State University are in the process of finalizing a teaming agreement for cross-utilization of their respective satellite stations. This system is called Unisat, and its Director is Uri Bar- Zemer. The satellite terminals are likely to be connected with each other via a dedicated line which will make it possible for institutions on the East Coast of the United States wishing to communicate with Russia east of the Urals, China, and Pacific Rim countries to do so through the San Diego terminal. In much the same way, Institutions on the West Coast will be able to communicate with sites in Europe, Africa, South America and European Russia. The facility at Bridgewater will be ready for transmission in late 1994 and the one in San Diego in the middle of 1995. The location of these terminals makes coverage of sites in all of continental Russia possible in one satellite hop, a significant fact when considering video teleconferencing and data transmission. The antennas at both colleges will point to satellites belonging to the Russian satellite system. Technical staff is currently evaluating the various options for deploying VSAT technology so that remote sites within the system will be able to use small and simplified transmit/receive terminals thus minimizing operational cost. The Bridgewater facility was funded by a major grant from the US Department of Energy, while the SDSU unit will be funded from the University's own resources. It is expected that the cost of the satellite space segment, by far the most significant cost in satellite communication, will be paid internally in Russia by participating institutions and local networks. It is likely that two additional universities will join in the course of 1995 to form a consortium with additional international gateways in the Washington DC/Maryland area and in Hawaii. This will further broaden the base and reach of the system.
This project represents an institutionally derived consortium-based effort at creating a non-profit, non-commercial TCI/IP based Internetwork linking institutions within Ukraine's academic, research, state, and non-governmental sectors with the global Internet. PNP is dedicated to providing full access to the global Internet using broad bandwidth links permitting the use of telnet, ftp, Gopher, and World Wide Web with such tools as Veronica and Mosaic. Primary support for developing internetwork resources and structure will be provided by the EARN-Ukraine and the United Nations Office in Ukraine, which is providing free-of-charge international connections.
This is a private project which would combine commercial and non-commercial users (governmental structures, scientific and educational centers, state enterprises, private enterprises, information centers, mass media organizations, and individuals) in a network providing direct access to the Internet. A project was presented at the NATO workshop for investments in a satellite antenna, lease of a satellite channel to Moscow (to the RELCOM node at KIAE), and training of specialists for a total value of $120,000. The Director of this project is Anatoly V. Kim, President of Nuron, Ltd.
In the course of the NATO Workshop representatives of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyz Republic expressed great interest in developing projects for World Bank and other funding which would combine development of a broad bandwidth national information infrastructures having full Internet connections and teleconferencing capability) with training and educational applications. They said they would develop these projects and then approach the World Bank and other sources of finance.
Not all of these projects are funded, they are in rather different stages of development, and it is unlikely that any one of them alone could created a network of efficient size and scope.
Our basic proposal is to encourage a union of forces between those responsible for these different projects, and the creation of national organizations in Russia and other FSU countries capable of helping coordinate their efforts so that the result will be the creation of a modern, cost-effective distance education system for Russia and other participating countries which can be a model for other countries.
To unite forces in Russia, and other countries of the FSU, to create the kind of distance education system we are proposing, we suggest that a key role could be played by national Distance Education Support Centers. The core resources for establishing such a Center in Russia could come from those earmarked for this purpose in the World Bank's Management and Financial Training Project. But this project does not directly provide resources for the necessary physical and electronic infrastructure of the system. It could, however, help finance a limited number of uplinks and downlinks as part of individual training projects approved by the NTF. If the Kazakhstan and Kyrgyz Republic projects proposed during the workshop are developed and implemented, in these countries infrastructure investments would be included.
If the Russian Government and interested foreign donors could put additional resources into this the Russian Center, it could do much more than provide technical assistance to training institutions wishing to use modern distance education techniques. It could coordinate the actually physical development of the system and administer it. It could arrange for lease of satellite transponders, promote the development of the Internet in Russia, and provide other needed coordination activities.
A key matter will be developing a system of governance for the Center which will effectively represent the different Russian organizations interested in the development of the distance education system. The tradition in the FSU (and not only there), is that each organization would like to control a system itself. The economics of dedicated systems is not encouraging. There are very large returns to scale in developing electronic networks. Therefore economic forces are pushing toward a collaborative solution.
We hope that the NATO Workshop, which made progress in developping a cooperative framework for networking in Russia and other NATO partners, can help to unite efforts and resources to create a Center for Distance Education which can coordinate different projects without threatening any participating institution.
A matter which we believe is worth examining, is how to develop a system whereby commercial uses of the system would subsidize educational and training uses, thereby avoiding a drain on the Federal Treasury at a time when the need for economic stabilization requires restraining government expenditures.
We believe that returns to scale from a large system will be sufficient to allow cheaper user charges for both commercial and academic users than would a series of separate dedicated networks. This may require some changes in legislation and tariff structures.
Borisov, N.V., V.N. Vasiliev, Yu.F. Ryabov, and S.I. Tarasov (1994). Regional University and Scientific North-West Network (RUS NWNet). Paper prepared for the NATO Advanced Workshop on Networking in the CIS: Establishing a Cooperative Framework for Networking in Russia and Other NATO Partners, Teaching Center "Golitsyno", Moscow Oblast, 29 September-1 October, 1994.
Galitsky, A.V., P.T. Knight, M.E. Tichonov, J.A. Chapljgin, and A.V. Vopilov (1994). Network Infrastructure Development and Defense Industry Conversion for Satellite Towns: Using and Building an Electronic Distance Education System for Russia with Connections to the Worldwide Information Society. Proceedings of the ICDED'94, pp. 177-181.
Johnson, D.A., T. Utsumi, and A. Ivannikov (1994). The Global Universities Project to Compare and Evaluate Available Technologies: Learning through Using. Proceedings of the ICDED'94, pp 380-389.
Kapelushnikov, I. Albegova, T. Leonova, and R. Yemtsov (1993). Investment in Training for Transition to the Market. Paper submitted to the World Bank (September), in English and Russian.
Knight, P.T. (1994). Education for All through Electronic Distance Education. Proceedings of the ICDED'94, pp. i27-i34.
Proceedings of the First International Conference on Distance Education in Russia, Distance Learning and New Technologies in Education, Moscow, July 5-9, 1994. (ICDED'94).
The Concept of Telecommunications Development in the Higher Education System of Russia. Official Document approved by the State Committee on Higher Education (1994), in Russian (English translation under preparation by SUNY, Albany).
Vasiliev, V.N., V.A. Vasenin, Y.G. Kirchin, Y.V. Gugel, and A.M. Robachevsky (1994). RUNNET: Federal University Network of Russia. Paper prepared for the NATO Advanced Workshop on Networking in the CIS: Establishing a Cooperative Framework for Networking in Russia and Other NATO Partners, Teaching Center "Golitsyno", Moscow Oblast, 29 September-1 October, 1994.