Project design and development costs for today's distance learning/telemedicine projects can be enough to scare many institutions away from the drawing board. Aside from having to have a respectable staff of experienced technical advisors at near arm's length, distance learning/telemedicine projects also require an intensive investment in infrastructure and equipment. So how does an institution with few or no "extra" dollars to play with obtain what most would consider a 21st Century necessity?

Lake City Community College today operates one of the most modern and comprehensive compressed video teleconferencing systems in Florida. Composed of seven multi-point electronic sites spread over 1300 square miles, each with travel-to-almost-anywhere capabilities, many experts recognize it to be one of the south's most modern independent rural distance education networks. It was designed to perform a multitude of functions including distance learning, telemedicine research, workforce training, community out-reach and more. But it didn't just "happen." In 1993, Lake City Community College started out with nothing more than a vision and a dedicated group of nay-sayers who predicted total failure because (they thought) we were too small to garner any serious attention. Their skepticism: where we would find the money to build such a system.

Lake City Community College is one of 28 community colleges in Florida and among the smallest of the bunch. It serves a district is roughly twice the size of the state of Rhode Island, is predominantly rural and stretches from the Gulf Of Mexico to near the Atlantic Ocean. The entire district is served from a single campus located in Lake City. Before the system was put into place, accessing the campus by students residing within the district often meant a round-trip of 120 miles or more over back roads for each day of class. Clearly, we were losing students to other institutions -- or worse yet, students were deciding against attending college at all. Something had to be done. We had to come up with a long-term solution for accessing and retaining future student populations. The solution that emerged was a comprehensive interactive distance learning system composed of digital electronic sites located within each community. But the cost of that solution, we found, would seem prohibitive -- almost $700,000and the College certainly didn't have the resources necessary to build such a system.

By 1996, three years after the original idea for building a multi-purpose system emerged, Lake City Community College was busy constructing its initial dream system. We credit our success to our ability to "think outside the box" during the early planning stages. That is, we decided against a purely dedicated-to-our-needs-only system in favor of one that would not only lend itself to our own community college instructional delivery needs, but would also be attractive to K-12 users, telemedicine users, workforce providers and even private business executives. This idea was unique (if not radical), but we figured the more diverse the user group, the more opportunities to generate dollars and keep the system in use. This thinking also allowed us to develop up-front partnerships that were promised equal access to the system when needed but without the partners having to worry about the substantial management and overhead of infrastructure and equipment maintenance associated with single owner systems.

However, each partner would be required to bring something to the table that could be used as match in our overall quest for grant funding -- which would be our primary sources for funding. As the plan went, we pooled the match committed by each partner, and set out to write several grants over the next few years. We were so successfully funded that we were able to build the "dream" system that we originally wanted all along within just three years of concept.

The grant sources were particularly complimentary of our "partnership" approach and equally receptive to the diversity of the group of partners that the College had recruited. They included a health-care provider, several K-12 school districts, and even a private entity. They were also receptive to the unique "multi-purpose" aspect of the system and our creative method of obtaining match to reach the requirements of each grant. We wrote four separate grants and all were funded.

Today the system is in wide use. We can conduct up to four separate conferences at a single time over almost unlimited geographic areas. The system incorporates a wide range of learning tools including satellite conferencing integration, links to health care givers, Internet access and information sharing interfaces, videotape, multi camera angles, PC applications and more. And we are consistently approached by other entities wanting to become partners.

The Lake City Community College planners' early penchant for risk, coupled with a willingness and the ability to "think outside the box" resulted in the institution being able to acquire more than one-half million dollars in cash toward its dream project before the first wire had even been installed.

If you'd like to learn more about Lake City Community College and how we went from nowhere to near the top of Florida's digital delivery ladder in three short years using little of our own money (which we didn't have anyway), please feel free to contact me. I'm at sotod@mail.lakecity.cc.fl.us or by phone at (904) 752-1822 extension 1241.