AOL Makes Inroads in PA School Market

In the ongoing competition among companies to build the "essential" education Web portal, America Online (AOL) has just inked a deal with the state of Pennsylvania to provide services to schools through AOL@School. The portal, available free of charge, includes a cutting-edge Internet filter that will enable Pennsylvania schools to meet the requirements of the federal government's new Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA). The deal with Pennsylvania follows similar AOL deals with Florida, Maryland, and Virginia.

Mark Nixon, AOL's executive director of education, stresses that no one using the state-customized version of AOL@School will see advertising while on the site. Neither will schools be required to use the portal. "We don't want to force people to use it," says Nixon, "but the benefits are such that we hope that everyone wants to use it."

AOL@School includes a "Homework Help" database of Internet resources, a collection of lesson plans for teachers, and links to Encyclopedia.com as well as other sites already available free on the Web. States that sign up for AOL@School will receive custom "state-focus" windows that give teachers and administrators access to state standards and information on staff development.

Nixon admits, however, that AOL@School is attractive to educators at least partly because it includes a free Internet filter. The CIPA law requires that all schools and libraries receiving e-rate funds install filters for controlling access to the Internet, but the law includes no funding for schools and libraries to purchase and maintain filtering systems. Nixon says that AOL's new filtering software, provided by the Oregon-based software firm RuleSpace, is far more flexible and sensitive than most filtering software available. It uses "context recognition technology" that supposedly enables the software to make extremely accurate judgments as to whether a site offers pornography, for example, as opposed to sex education. If a student types in a URL not specifically forbidden by AOL's staff-evaluated database of Web sites, the software instantly analyzes the unfamiliar page and allows or blocks it on the fly. If allowed, an AOL reviewer makes a final decision within 48 hours about whether to include the site.

John Bailey, Pennsylvania's director of educational technology, says that the filter is an added bonus but not the primary reason the state made the deal with AOL. "We know that 80 percent of the schools in the state filter already. AOL@School simplifies the Internet for teachers. They don't have time to go out and search the Internet for materials to support their curriculum," says Bailey.

Nancy Willard, director of the Responsible Netizen program at the University of Oregon (netizen.uoregon. edu), says she doesn't object to the deal as long as use of AOL@School is optional. Still, she says, "by making agreements to use AOL @School, educators are turning over responsibility for determining what activities and information are appropriate for our students to a very powerful private corporation that clearly has additional profit motives wrapped into its business model."