In an announcement Friday, IBM unveiled an educational partnership between its 2-year-old Academic Initiative program and the Appalachian College Association (ACA) that will bring US$5 million in software, IT workshops, faculty training, technical services and discounts on hardware at the ACA's 35 two- and four-year liberal arts colleges and universities.
The plan is that the professors will take the lessons they've learned from the training and bring it into their classrooms starting next fall and share it with some of the 39,000 students that attend the member schools.
'IBM is concerned about where its next IT workers are going to come from,' said Martin Ramsey, chief instructional technologist for the nonprofit ACA consortium. 'They should come from Appalachia.'
This is a part of the world, he said, that has been behind the curve in terms of technology for decades if not centuries. 'We're in a global economy, and being from Appalachia is no excuse. With the global economy, we need to compete on the world stage.'
The program will aim to motivate and train students to seek careers in IT in an area of the nation where college graduation rates lag 35 percent behind the U.S. average, according to figures provided by the Appalachian Regional Commission, a federal-state partnership that works to create opportunities for self-sustaining economic development and improved quality of life in the region.
IBM will go to the campuses of the ACA's member schools in Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia to hold the workshops, which will include sessions on such topics as IBM's DB2 database software and its WebSphere business software, as well as Linux, services-oriented architecture and other topics. The first workshop was held last week at Bryan College in Dayton, Tenn., where faculty members from the ACA's colleges learned the inner workings of IBM's Rational Software Architect development platform.
By teaching dozens of professors from ACA schools, IBM will spread the lessons to hundreds and thousands of students when the professors go back into their classrooms, Ramsey said. Next fall, an estimated 350 to 500 students will take classes from professors who have participated in some of the training workshops, according to IBM.
Earl Reed, an assistant professor of computer science at Bryan, said the IBM/ACA partnership will bring a huge variety of resources to the school and its students.
"For us, it will revolutionize the [computer science] program in a number of ways," Reed said. "It brings new tools that we can use to teach the students" from a central IBM portal that can be easily accessed at any time. "It's very valuable. In the past, we have had to go to numerous sources to get open-source stuff. It takes a lot of time and energy."
Also, he said, the use of IBM's wealth of technology information could help boost enrollment in his department. "They've had a trend in the last few years of computer science enrollments dropping" across the nation. "Something is needed to get it going again." The project uses open standards and open-source applications, along with IBM technologies and educational resources to help faculty and students stay current with the IT industry and to get students better-prepared for IT jobs. About 450,000 students around the world are participating in the program. Mark Hanny, vice president of IBM's Academic Initiative, said his company sees the program as helping to provide customers and partners with future IT workers, which will also benefit IBM.
"I think this kind of work could really foster the development of high-tech start-ups in central Appalachia," Hanny said. "It wouldn't surprise me over time ... that many [participating students] may stay in the area [after graduating]. A lot of the next Googles could come out of central Appalachia."
Ramsey, of the ACA, said the IBM program gives the schools a huge range of possibilities and resources that they couldn't have obtained on their own. "We're struggling to help an underserved region," Ramsey said of the ACA. "We're delighted to have IBM as a partner. We sort of feel like we're in this little corner of the world that gets overlooked sometimes. This could really catapult a new kind of student into the market that would be so employable by IBM and its partners."