Empowering Geographically Isolated Communities with Instant Access to Learning and Training through Satellite

Enabling learning for members of geographically isolated communities such as agrarian, or maritime communities presents benefits in terms of promoting regional development and cost savings for governments and companies. We present a methodology for designing a satellite and wireless based network infrastructure and learning services to support distance learning for such isolated communities. This methodology entails (a) the involvement of community members in the development of targeted learning services from an early stage and (b) a service-oriented approach to learning solution deployment. Here this methodology is applied in the context of the European research project BASE (BASE2 2006), in which the following two types of geographically isolated communities are considered: agrarian and maritime.