Interactive virtual classrooms where students post their assignments on the Internet so students can access and write responses to other students' writings teach students how to research and communicate using all different forms of media. As universities strive to keep up with technology in society and faculty design courses to use modern technology, the importance of high speed student access to university networks and the Internet through state of the art technology become increasingly important. Phi Kappa Theta Fraternity houses the electronic center of the Greeknet System. As universities incorporate the use of computers into the realm of teaching they also recognize the need to implement ambitious network upgrade programs that provide an infrastructure supportive of the use of advanced technologies. These infrastructure upgrades often involve the delivery of very high bandwidth capabilities to every classroom, faculty offices and on-campus residence halls.
Ethernet is the most common high speed connection used on most campuses.
Such connections are convenient to use and are about 350 times faster than the traditional telephone modems available to off-campus students. When such upgrades take place on a university campus, students residing in off-campus fraternities and sororities or apartments are usually left with telephone modems for connecting to the university's data network. Access via a modem is not only slow but limited by the fact that in many cases modem access is automatically disconnected after a specific time period of use by the computing center in order to prevent some students from dominating the modem pool access to the university network. Busy signals are also a problem in getting into the university network via modem. The significance of speed can be illustrated by a common course project assigned by an instructor which requires the student to access multiple Web sites in search of information prior to the synthesis of this information into a report.