Dominican University, a Hispanic-serving institution in River Forest, qualified for a grant through the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s Connecting Minority Communities Pilot Program, which – while a mouthful – awarded it $2.5 million in federal funding to improve their broadband capacity.
“We want to level the playing field as much as possible and this grant was so importance for us because unlike large schools like Northwestern or UIC who can easily write a check and make these changes, we don’t want to pass that cost onto our students so we are trying to find other sources to be able to defray that,”said Todd Kleine, chief information officer at Dominican University.
According to Stanford University, the idea of a digital divide “refers to the growing gap between the underprivileged members of society, especially the poor, rural, elderly, and handicapped portion of the population who do not have access to computers or the internet.”
Part of the Biden-Harris Administration’s “Internet for All,” which emphasized the importance of high-speed internet access for Americans not as a luxury, but as a necessity, the grant was made possible through the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, which allocated $285 million to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration to create a Connecting Minority Communities Pilot Program to provide grants to eligible Historically Black Colleges or Universities, Tribal Colleges or Universities, and minority-serving institutions to expand their broadband internet access.
According to the Federal Register, the grant can be used for broadband internet access service, equipment, hiring information technology personnel, and to lend or provide equipment to eligible students or patrons.
Kleine said Dominican and Chicago State University are the only educational institutions in Illinois to receive the grant.
“It was really meant for minority serving institutions to be able to help try to break down the digital divide,” Kleine said. “We have lots of students who are first-generation and minority and just through systemic inequities in society, don’t have the access to laptop devices and stable internet. It applied to part of our population.”
The university received the grant in January 2023 and must spend the funds by January 2025.
Kleine said the university has begun working on some of their initiatives that would primarily help improve the school’s infrastructure.
In an effort to keep tuition as low as possible, Kleine said the university hadn’t upgraded its wire and wireless internet network on campus, which was becoming “ancient.”
“A large focus of this grant was on getting a lot of the behind-the-scenes components of the network upgraded,” Kleine said.
Included in those behin- the-scene components was an upgrade to a load balancer, which according to TechTarget, is a device that is used to “distribute network traffic across a pool of servers known as a server farm.” The distribution helps optimize network performance, create reliability and cut down wait time.
Additionally, seven classrooms have been updated to a “HyFlex” classroom, a hybrid-flexible classroom where teachers can address both the in-person and remote learners at the same time.
“In theory, you shouldn’t know any difference between the two because the equipment would enable you to feel like you are in the classroom,” Kleine said.
Kleine said they will continue to upgrade classrooms as long as the funds allow, saying he would like to get to 10 classrooms upgraded.
Kleine added that the university is also concluding a major project where they replaced all of the technical elements of the network: access points, switches, cabling.
“It is a tricky project because we are essentially rebooting or redoing the entire network with people on campus,” Kleine said. “It is a major project and the grant has helped defray a large part of that.”
Parts of the grant focused on digital literacy, Kleine said, which Dominican is addressing by helping students become proficient in computer software programs such as Microsoft, Adobe and programming languages.
This allowed students the opportunity to not only be able to work the software, but also become certified in them if they choose, Kleine said.
“Somebody could go through a Python coding workshop and then at the end of it sit for a Python certification,” Kleine said. “We wanted to be able to hold the workshops and also let the participants walk away with something tangible.”
The grant funds have also allowed Dominican to hire five full-time employees for the IT department.
Kleine said they have also brought onboard nine students to intern as “digital navigators.”
The students have already worked on a cybersecurity project during the fall semester and will be conducting an assessment of the public spaces on campus that have computers to see what the student body would like those spaces to look like. Students will also be diving deep into the onboarding process during the summer to find potential ways to improve the process.
“All of these are different approaches to try to break down those systemic inequities that some of our students might be coming to campus with,” Kleine said.
As Dominican looks to the future, along with the opening of their expansion into the Pilsen neighborhood, Kleine said he hopes to find possibilities for additional grants to keep the university growing.
“We are hoping there are future funding opportunities to be able to do some similar work down there as well,” Kleine said.