The extreme clarity of sound, the complete lack of lag time in delivery of information , and the crispness of pictures – coupled with the ability to offer media rich instruction – make distance education more like an in-person classroom experience than ever before. It allows NIU to bring the experience of classes on its main campus in DeKalb to students at its outreach centers in Naperville, Hoffman Estates and Rockford, and to dozens of appropriately equipped community colleges throughout the region.
The NIU School of Music has already begun using the network to give its students access to performances by world class musicians and teachers around the country, and to share some of its own faculty with other schools. The huge bandwidth available allows for transmission of compact disc quality sound and DVD quality pictures, enabling students and teachers to hear and see each other as if they were in the same room, an important consideration for musical instruction where previous generations of distance education hardware simply could not adequately convey what was happening.
NIUNet is already expanding the learning opportunities for K-12 students in DeKalb and Sycamore, with several others looking to partner with the university in the months ahead. The two partner districts are already enjoying dramatically increased access to the Illinois Century Network (a state network providing Internet service to schools, libraries and universities) at a cost 75 percent lower than what they were paying. The improved bandwidth opens up new educational worlds for students allowing them to interact with educators and students around the world in new and exciting ways. Schools that extend the high speed network to their front door will also have the ability to allow students to peer through telescopes in Hawaii or delve into (and even manipulate) the world at the nano level– all in real time.
The two partner districts are also using the high speed communication networks made possible by NIUNet to switch almost completely to VOIP phone service, saving tens of thousands of dollars a year by doing so. The connections also create opportunities for enhanced student teaching in those schools by giving NIU instructors on campus the ability to observe student teachers in real time without ever leaving campus.
As more schools sign on, the NIU School of Music is contemplating creating a program to bring music instruction to districts that cannot afford full-fledged programs, and to expand the types of music taught in schools across the region, perhaps delivering classes in steel drum music, among others.
For researchers at NIU, one of the most exciting aspects of NIUNet is that it allowed the university to join Internet2 . Designed as the next generation of the Internet, I2 is a global consortium of high speed broadband networks developed by academia, industry and government to expand collaborations worldwide. It is strictly reserved for researcher and education activities. It allows researchers in all disciplines at NIU to collaborate, essentially in real time, with colleagues at universities and research laboratories across the world.
At NIU, researchers participating in projects at Fermi National Laboratory in Batavia can now send enormous data files from Fermi Lab to campus for analysis. Data that previously could have taken hours or days to transmit can now be sent in seconds or minutes. As a member of I2, those researchers will have the same ability to collaborate on projects with scientists at CERN, in Switzerland, which will soon surpass Fermilab as home to the world’s largest particle accelerator. The network provides similar connectivity to more than 200 universities, research labs and other academic facilities worldwide, opening up exciting new opportunities for collaboration between researchers at NIU and their colleagues around the globe.
When NIU strikes up a partnership to extend NIUNet into a community, that town instantly gets a powerful tool for economic development. High speed fiber optic networks are fast becoming regarded as another form of utility service, like water and sewer. Such networks make communities much more attractive to companies that do business around the world whose employees must be able to communicate as if they are in the same office.
For remote communities, having access to high speed fiber optic networks also opens up the possibility of attracting a new type of business: data centers. Large corporations, anxious to back up their data (sometimes in real time) at facilities far removed from their headquarters often look for such communities to locate these multi-million facilities.
Today’s doctors have access to more and better information on their patients than ever before. Unfortunately, many patients don’t have access to the doctors they need, or the information about their condition is locked in the files of one doctor while they are being treated by another many miles away.
In Illinois, NIUNet is an important part of the solution to that problem. It will be part of a state-wide fiber optic network dedicated to hospitals, allowing the enormous digital files created by MRIs, CAT Scans and other diagnostic tests to be shipped from one location to another as quickly and easily as the rest of us share emails. NIU assisted in writing a $20M grant to create that network, to be known as the Illinois Rural Health Network. When completed, the network will allow residents in the far corners of the state to consult with world-class physicians across Illinois and around the world – without leaving their hometowns.