Connecting the nation's educational sector

The national Internet2 K20 Initiative brings together Internet2 member institutions and innovators from primary and secondary schools, colleges and universities, libraries, and museums to extend new technologies, applications, middleware, and content to all educational sectors, as quickly and connectedly as possible.

Goals of the K20 Initiative

• To bring innovators in K-12, community colleges, universities, libraries, and museums into appropriate regional, national, and international advanced networking efforts, via the Sponsored Education Group Participant (SEGP) process.
• To encourage and help sustain partnerships among these education institutions, the private sector, and government.
• To enhance teaching and learning by facilitating projects that explore the ways in which advanced network applications, services, tools, and digital content can extend access to education and educational resources.
• To develop mechanisms for timely communication across all educational sectors and regions in order to enable quick, pervasive technology diffusion

Through the SEGP program, Indiana's education and research network was granted access to Abilene, the high performance backbone used by the Internet2 community, in 2001. Abilene supports all Internet2 communities and programs by linking regional networking aggregation points (gigaPoPs), pioneered by Internet2 universities.

As a result, every college, school, and library connected to one of Indiana’s educational networks is also connected to Abilene. Your connection allows you to collaborate with individuals and groups at other Internet2 and SEGP sites over a private, high-performance network, taking advantage of applications and services not currently available on the commodity Internet. With a modest investment in video conferencing equipment, any site on the network can initiate or participate in high-quality, full-screen video conferencing sessions with others connected to Abilene.

As members of the Internet2 community through the SEGP program, teachers, learners, and researchers can also get involved in exciting collaborative educational programs. Opportunities include shared classes with peers throughout the world, participation in advanced research, electronic field trips, advanced placement courses for high school students, and access to world experts and resources.

About Internet2

Internet2 is a not-for-profit consortium led by over 200 universities working in partnership with government and industry to develop and deploy advanced network applications and technologies. The primary goals of the Internet2 consortium are to:

• Create a leading edge network capability for the national research community
• Enable revolutionary Internet applications
• Ensure the rapid transfer of new network services and applications to the broader Internet community.

The term “Internet2” is often used to refer to the high performance network used by the Internet2 consortium, but this is a misnomer. Internet2 is a network of organizations and people, not wires and routers.

In 1998, Indiana University was chosen to run Abilene's Network Operations Center, which provides comprehensive network management services for all the physical and operational aspects of the entire Abilene network. Indiana University also runs Indiana’s gigaPoP.