Johannes M. Bauer, Keith Hampton, and community partners will be recognized by Michigan State University on February 24 with the 2022 Distinguished Partnership Award for Community-Engaged Service for their efforts to increase understanding of the cost of digital inequalities to rural students, and to help overcome discrepancies in access to high-speed internet connectivity.

Merit Network, Inc. (Joe Sawasky, Charlotte Bewersdorff), Eastern Upper Peninsula Intermediate School District (Jason F. Kronemeyer), Mecosta Osceola Intermediate School District (Fred Sharpsteen), St. Clair County Regional Educational Service Agency (Kevin D. Miller, Brenda Tenniswood), Washtenaw County Broadband Task Force (Ben Fineman), and the Southwest Michigan Planning Commission (K. John Egelhaaf) are the community partners in this project.

“This collaboration began in 2017 as an effort to help overcome discrepancies in access to high-speed Internet connectivity. By 2017, an estimated 27% of Michigan households with school-aged children, many of them located in rural parts of the state, did not have access to broadband connectivity. With our partners, this project put the knowledge and expertise of university faculty and students to work to address real world problems faced by local communities,” Hampton, professor in the Department of Media and Information, said.

The project led by Bauer and Hampton looked to understand the importance of broadband internet access to rural communities, measure the disparities between those rural and urban communities, and to provide a methodology for those communities to close that gap in access. Its success critically depended on collaboration with and support by several community partners. Merit Network, Inc., a regional education network, was instrumental throughout the entire collaboration, as were Eastern Upper Peninsula ISD, Mecosta Osceola ISD, and St. Clair County Regional Educational Service during the initial pilot project. [Read the full announcement on the Quello Center | Blog]

With ransomware and other cyberattacks on the rise, Indiana’s colleges and universities need a way to quickly know about and mitigate cybersecurity incidents on their networks.

That’s why I-Light, Indiana’s high-speed research and education network, and the Indiana GigaPOP are partnering with OmniSOC to provide these services to its members—at no extra cost.

OmniSOC is a shared cybersecurity operations center for higher education and research and a trusted leader in the higher education cybersecurity community. Since forming in 2018, the center has made a name for itself delivering critical, actionable, high-quality alerts 24x7x365, at substantial savings.

“In our monthly town hall meetings with our members, we are hearing that cybersecurity—and its high cost—are huge concerns for them,” said Marianne Chitwood, executive director, I-Light and Indiana GigaPOP. “Partnering with OmniSOC allowed us to meet both these needs, truly benefiting our members.”

The I-Light network connects its 40+ member institutions seamlessly to each other as well as to the Indiana GigaPOP, which gives them access to national and international research and education networks and enables collaborative research with partners across the country and around the world. [Read the full article at I-Light | News]

Facing a growing need for secured education cyberinfrastructure, OARnet and partners will develop the Virtual Research-Education Ohio (VROhio) program

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded OARnet a planning grant to develop a network of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) training and research resources for smaller higher education institutions in the state of Ohio.

In December 2020, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine allocated $12.1 million through the Governors Emergency Education Relief program to upgrade OARnet’s last-mile internet connections to 40 colleges and universities.

To make best use of the upgraded internet capabilities, OARnet and partners will develop new STEM training and research resources, to be known as the Virtual Research-Education Ohio (VROhio) program, that can be shared among institutions. Colleges and universities are facing a growing need for secured cyberinfrastructure to support both in-person and remote STEM education.

“OARnet is grateful to the Ohio Department of Higher Education for identifying and supporting critical cyberinfrastructure needs,” said Pankaj Shah, executive director of OARnet and primary investigator on the NSF grant. “The National Science Foundation planning grant will help us create a solid foundation on which we can develop a full network of resources that will allow smaller colleges and universities to elevate their STEM education offerings, for the benefit of the state of Ohio.”

[Read full press release at OARnet | News]