Industry in the Appalachia Region of Northeast Tennessee has nowhere to turn to hire qualified college graduates with networking experience and cannot locally find unbiased assistance in planning and implementing local area networks (LANs). While the Computer Engineering Technology department should be a natural focus for this type of training, it has not been able to provide these skills because it has been severely lacking in the requisite equipment. Students have been exposed to LANs in a single limited-availability course that deals with a single network operating system (NOS). However, efforts are being made to correct this deficiency in order to increase the region's industrial success. The Computer Networking Laboratory seeks to eliminate these problems by providing students with a variety of network architectures and a large capacity network (up to 50 simultaneous users). At the same time, data gathered from laboratory experiences can be compiled into a document that makes available to companies and educational institutions the information necessary to emulate or adapt the exercises or put the results to work in a business environment. Several NOSs are being implemented in a hands-on laboratory environment, and the students are being given the opportunity to experiment with the LANs. A communications server is being included to enable users to call from remote sites and log on to use the facilities, which provides a new dimension in distance education. The new laboratory also allows industry workshops to be conducted to educate persons requiring specialized training. The program has the potential to reach at least four academic program areas in the current catalog (over 100 students per year) and potentially that many from industry. The impact on local institutions can be amplified by the production of the self-help documentation.
