opinion

Bangert: End coming for Netflix, other streaming distractions during Purdue classes?

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Caitlin Mills isn’t saying she’s signed onto Netflix when there’s a lag in a professor’s presentation in one of Purdue University’s big lecture halls, each one loaded with free broadband coverage.

“Let’s just say I’ve seen it before,” Mills, a Purdue sophomore, said last week, as she was doing some last-minute homework between classes outside the 470-seat Class of 1950 Lecture Hall. “Everyone’s on their phone or laptop or whatever, so it’s pretty easy – not that I would.”

What if, she’s asked, Purdue started restricting WiFi access in the lecture hall, effectively blocking – or at least limiting – access to broadband-sucking video streaming, gaming sites, social media and anything else deemed a classroom distraction?

It’s a similar question Purdue President Mitch Daniels has asked faculty members in recent weeks, as the university tries to get its arms around broadband costs that have nearly doubled and traffic on the WiFi system on the West Lafayette campus that is five times what it was in 2013.

“Is that really a thing?” Mills asked. “Sounds like high school or something.”

Gerry McCartney, Purdue chief information officer, stepped back from that ledge, on a university campus that is no high school setting and where broadband is considered an essential piece of everyday, academic life.

“I don’t see us going that way,” McCartney said. “But we’re coming up on a decision. Anything is fixable if you throw enough money at it. But is that what we want to do? … I think we need to have a larger discussion about what is appropriate in the classroom. Is it binge-watching ‘Breaking Bad,’ again? Right now, I don’t think there are any clear expectations on the principles here.

“Just look at the traffic we’re seeing – especially during class time.”

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Daniels made that point in mid-February, when he came asking for help during a meeting with faculty members on the University Senate.

His charts showed the broadband costs had climbed from $223,500 in 2013 to $415,095 in 2017. A 24-hour sample collected by McCartney’s department showed the biggest consumption on the Purdue network going to gaming sites, streamed music and assorted video providers.

That, Daniels said, included traffic from residence halls, where he conceded that students should be enjoying life beyond their studies.

The results of a one-week study of broadband use in two of Purdue’s largest classrooms, where bandwidth is at a premium due to the number of devices used in a confined space, brought Daniels to his real point.

The study, done in January 2016, tracked WiFi traffic in Room 1105 of Lilly Hall – capacity: 445 – and Room 129 of the Electrical Engineering Building – with its 468 seats – to determine what students were using on laptops, smartphones, watches, headphones and anything else pulling from access points set up in the classrooms devoted to an array of biology, math, economics, sociology, computer science and management courses.

Of that:

► Purdue lumped 34 percent into a category deemed “likely non-academic.” That included social media sites – Facebook and Twitter combined for 16 percent of all traffic in the classrooms that week – and streaming video sites Hulu, Netflix and Amazon Video, which ate up 10 percent of the bandwidth used. Gaming sites used 6 percent of the data that week.

► Just 4 percent was used on Purdue sites or what the university deemed “academic.”

► The other 62 percent was tossed into a category of “likely mixed,” split between Google, Apple, Amazon and data caches where the university keeps a host of applications and updates.

“I think it’s fair to say that probably, somewhere buried in there, there’s some academic work happening,” Daniels told faculty members. “But you’ll see, this is while someone is teaching. Generously defined, very few of the sites being visited, in the class period in those classrooms, were academic.”

Daniels said he wanted to get faculty thoughts: Was it time for a campuswide policy on browsing non-academic material while a class was in session?

“I’m delighted for Purdue to provide this free service for anything even remotely academic,” Daniels said. “But when it’s purely recreational, especially during class hours, I think it raises some questions. … If this keeps growing and growing, we’re going to have to think about other things.”

Among the faculty members in the room that day was Alan Friedman, a biology professor.

Friedman teaches Biology 110, Fundamentals of Biology, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday in Lilly 1105, a room with desks arranged on stadium-style tiers and more than a dozen WiFi access points lining the walls.

“Some of my colleagues tried banning technology,” Friedman said. “I never found that to be a solution.”

During a recent Monday session, Friedman used HotSeat – a proprietary Purdue online tool students can log onto through a laptop or smartphone – to quiz students about homework and points from a lecture on ribosomes and protein synthesis. Over the course of the 50-minute class, Friedman asked students to log in and answer a handful of multiple-choice questions.

Scanning the class from the back of the room, there were signs of stray shopping sites and Snapchat posts that popped up on laptop and phone screens. But, on that day, the amount of second-screen viewing was probably no much more than a normal business meeting in the outside world. Even then it cut both ways: The student who sneaked a series of video clips from Purdue’s victory over Minnesota the day before at Mackey Arena later went to Google to look up “rough endoplasmic reticulum.”

“That use of Wi-Fi is the only thing that makes this class possible, the way it’s being taught,” Friedman said of the way HotSeat makes a large lecture hall more interactive. “If I was a more media-savvy person, I’d love to come up with more ways to eat up that bandwidth. But if it’s going to, I don’t know, ‘Game of Thrones,’ then, yeah, we have a problem.”

Since 2007, when Purdue started offering expanded WiFi, the West Lafayette campus had 1,200 access points, said Julie Kercher-Updike, deputy chief information officer. Now, there are more than 10,000 access points.

Mark Sonstein, executive director of IT infrastructure services at Purdue, said the pressure on the campus wireless system – called Purdue Air Link and known as PAL – has intensified in the two years since the study was done in the Electrical Engineering and Lilly lecture halls.

Much of that has to do with advances in streaming video and the devices able to easily download it, he said. A 30-minute video that once consumed 300MB in a low-resolution format a smartphone could handle now can easily pull down 3GB of high-definition viewing on a newer, stronger smartphone or laptop.

McCartney said the issue is hardly new. (“In my day,” McCartney said, “it was hiding a newspaper or a book during class.”) The technology and the cost associated have changed.

How much would it cost to simply beef up to handle a growing and unfettered WiFi demand on campus?

“Let’s just say, a lot. We don’t know what the upper bounds really are with this,” McCartney said, rattling off the promise of more wearable devices that will automatically tap into WiFi points wherever they are. And that’s just for starters in a tech world growing exponentially.

He said the other technical options – limiting access in classrooms or “packet shaping” so Purdue-approved sites get priority – aren’t that great.

“Are we ready for that emotional wear and tear?” McCartney asked. “Or are there things we can do with faculty and students to get a handle on this. … It’s not just a social question. It’s a business decision.”

Reach J&C columnist Dave Bangert at 765-420-5258 or at dbangert@gannett.com. Follow on Twitter: @davebangert.