• WSU College of Pharmacy accesses INHS Meditech® System: WSU and INHS have integrated the Meditech® system as a component of the education experience for the students enrolled in the Doctor of Pharmacy program at Washington State University (and ultimately other health science programs offered by Eastern Washington University and Washington State University at the Riverpoint Campus in Spokane). Access to Meditech® is beneficial to the students and the health care providers in the region. Developing this type of partnership between INHS and WSU Spokane creates a win-win situation for the health care facilities, students and our community. The implementation of the Meditech® system, leveraging VPnet, has enabled the integration of healthcare information technology within the curriculum and provides the students with a stronger foundation that should better prepare them for experiential education and should decrease the training time required by the employer after their graduation.

Other VPnet members, including North Idaho College, Community Colleges of Spokane, and the WSU College of Nursing have either integrated or are planning to be integrated with Meditech® for similar purposes.

• Distributed Music Rehearsals: Spokane jazz musician Craig Volosing is working closely with Eastern Washington University and VPnet to investigate the technical feasibility of having musicians interact live at a distance over a computer network as if they were playing together in the same room. The idea is to develop the technical and musical expertise to facilitate the rehearsal of remote guest artists, increasing the number and variety of guest musicians available for both music education and fine arts performances. Baseline tests have been completed, and the project team is pursuing grant opportunities to fund additional research activities. Click here to see the video of the original distributed music test.

• Video Conferencing: VPnet is being utilized for a broad spectrum of video conferencing applications across the consortium. With the high bandwidth and Quality of Service (QoS) provided by VPnet, customer satisfaction levels are significantly higher than what is typically experienced across commodity Internet connections.

• GameFest: GameFest Spokane 2006 brought over 200 gamers together for a two day event in Spokane, Washington, a city widely recognized for its broadband infrastructure and welcoming community.

Game Fest taps into the growing popularity of Internet/networked gaming to create an event that invited new, casual and elite online gamers to compete against one another in the medium of digital entertainment. Computer game publishers, hardware manufacturers and consumer electronics companies were on hand to demonstrate their latest innovations, while Game Fest participants enjoyed the opportunity to meet and network with gamers from across the region.

GameFest leveraged the broadband fiber infrastructure of VPnet as well as other broadband connectivity throughout the Spokane metropolitan area to support the high bandwidth traffic requirements of this event.

• Business Plan Competition Workshops : VPnet is being utilized for broadcasting and recording workshops for the upcoming 2005/2006 business plan competition collaboration between Gonzaga University, Whitworth College, Washington State University and Eastern Washington University. The workshops were originally scheduled to occur at a single venue at Gonzaga University. Leveraging VPnet and the video conference bridge services from INHS, the workshops will be broadcast "live" across the VPnet network to WSU Pullman, and Whitworth so that students can attend without traveling to Gonzaga. Additionally, the recorded workshops will be made available on the centralized content server so that students can access the same workshops via video streaming technology, when it's more convenient.

• Business Continuity : Spokane Community College (SCC) Information Systems has established a contract with Liberty Lake Internet Exchange (LLIX) a local disaster recovery services organization, to provide off-site storage and potentially business continuity services for all of their mission critical IT databases and functions. Leveraging the high bandwidth of VPnet, SCC can transport data very quickly to the LLIX site without securing additional bandwidth for these services.

• Healthcare Education: Inland Northwest Health Services (INHS) and North Idaho College (NIC) are collaborating across VPnet. INHS is providing access to their Meditech system to allow nursing and other health professional students to learn how to use the system prior to their first clinical experience in local health care facilities. This allows students to be better prepared entering the health care environment and also decreases the amount of required onsite training. Health care facilities use Meditech for all documentation, including health history, routine care, labs, diagnostic reports, and medication administration. NIC is making their 25-seat computer lab available to health care facilities that may need additional space for training their employees.

• Gridstat: Researchers at WSU Pullman are hoping to use VPnet to provide high speed data collection for Gridstat, software for monitoring the power grid. Gridstat could be instrumental in preventing power outages such as the one that struck the Eastern US in 2003.

• Gridstat Testing: Carl Hauser (WSU Pullman) and John Shovic (EWU Riverpoint) are connected to develop testbeds for assessing security, availability and performance of Gridstat technology in a geographically distributed setting 

• Inland Northwest Collaborative E-learning Project: Faculty members at Eastern Washington University have received initial funding towards developing a digital classroom. With the use of VPnet, students will experience a "virtual" learning environment in which the professor teaches from another location, but can read and interact with the class in real time with an astonishing level of acoustical and visual detail.

• LIFTS (Life Improvement and Feasible Transportation Services): A collaborative effort with Washington State University Spokane, Spokane County, Spokane Transit Authority and State and Federal government uses Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to assist low-income citizens in finding resources necessary to pursue employment and educational opportunities.

• CopyCat Captions: Spokane entrepreneurs from the fields of entertainment technology and disability services have developed a prototype for remote instant captioning using Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) in concert with collaborative text editing to provide individualized access to communication events for people with communication impairments.  They have developed a new economic model bringing self-employment to people with vision, mobility, and stamina disabilities.  VPnet will carry the sounds of an EWU classroom to the ears of someone at SCC using ASR to translate it into text on a shared page, while a third person at Gonzaga makes occasional corrections.  The students in the EWU classroom can use laptops, palm devices, even dynamic Braille readers to customize their access to the instant captioning in their classroom. 

• Remote Classroom Observations: Spokane Public Schools (District 81) and Whitworth College are utilizing VPnet to conduct remote classroom observations by the College of Education. Two initial pilot tests were conducted in April 2005, where a class of Whitworth "pre-service" students observed an elementary class to glean teaching approaches and best practices. The project is continuing during the 2005-2006 school year with observation cameras being located in both elementary and high school classrooms.

• Remote Student Teacher Observations: Several VPnet members are planning to utilize VPnet to conduct remote student teacher observations. A student teacher will take a web-based camera to the K-12 classroom, plug it into the network, and the student teacher evaluation will be conducted remotely by college of education faculty. This will reduce time and scheduling challenges for the faculty evaluators, as well as will reduce variables that might possibly "skew" the student teaching environment.

• Digital Content Archive: VPnet education members (K-12 and Higher Ed) are utilizing a centralized content management server to archive events, lectures and other pertinent information that can be shared across the VPnet membership. This tool enables members to maintain private content or share content with others, thus increasing educational and professional development efficiencies throughout the consortium.

• Perioperative Nursing Class - Spokane Community College, in cooperation with Inland Northwest Health Services, is providing a series of continuing education for working healthcare professionals. They are now offering their perioperative nursing class to students in multiple geographic regions, leveraging VPnet. Students will take the majority of the the class via VPnet. Nurses in Colville will be located in Mt Carmel Hospital in Colville, Washington; and additional students will be located at Mid-Valley Hospital in Omak, Washington. VPnet and the INHS Telehealth network will provide telecommunication services to the regional hospitals, which will serve as clinical sites for the clinical portion of the classes. The curriculum provides RNs interested in operating room nursing with education in theory, principles, rationale and skills necessary to operating room nurses with emphasis on the circulating role.

Projects planned for deployment on VPnet

• Suicide Prevention Education: Institute addresses the recommendations included in developing social policy by testing and evaluating the delivery of a multi-media, interactive digital online suicide prevention education training program for key gatekeepers identified by the Surgeon General and who are currently members of the VP Network.

• Virtual Reality Research: Researchers from WSU Pullman are working with private enterprises to research the use of virtual reality in manufacturing, healthcare and training.

• Transmission Engineering Simulation: Gonzaga University is working with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to access their computer cluster for running a transmission engineering simulator for their engineering curriculum.

• Plus many more: Please check back often as many other projects are being planned for VPnet.