Why schools, colleges & universities around the world are moving to the free Cloud Computing Applications? What are the benefits of moving to the cloud? What are the pre-requisites for moving to the free education cloud apps?
Best & Free Cloud Apps for Educational Institutes
- Google Apps Education Edition
- Microsoft Live@edu
Benefits
- Free of cost, robust service.
- Branding of your institute (school, college or university) as you’ve a custom domain e-Mail Ids with your school/college/university name as suffix (Say your institute’s domain name is abcd.edu then your students will have e-Mail Ids like Student_Name@abcd.edu)
- Enterprise class hosted e-Mail: the quality of e-Mail service, collaboration tools & storage services are better than any of the available paid on-premise services. (I guess!)
- Quick & Effective Communication with Anytime Anywhere Access.
- Collaborate globally: Collaboration tools leads to collective intelligence & creativity as students may work on their project document at the same time.
- Help teachers (& students) in organizing their classroom presentations and schedules.
- No maintenance cost.
- Security will be taken care of by the provider.
- Privacy: Google Apps is in compliance with FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act). I am not so sure about Live@Edu.
- Go Green: You’ll save on notebooks, papers, printing etc.
- Easy to deploy.
- Finally, you choose any one of them & your institute is associating itself with one of the most respected global IT brands.
A Brief List of Schools, Colleges, Universities & State Education Departments already on Cloud Apps:
Google Apps Education Edition Deployments
- Oregon Department of Education (USA)
- University of Southern California (USA)
- Arizona State University (USA)
- University of Notre Dame (USA)
- XIM – Bhubaneshwar (India)
- IT-BHU (India)
- FMS, the University of Delhi (India)
- New South Wales Department of Education and Training (Australia)
- Open University Malaysia (Malaysia)
- University of Cape Town - Graduate School of Business (South Africa)
- Alexandria University (Egypt)
- Riyadh College of Technology (Saudi Arabia)
- Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Facultad de Ciencias (Mexico)
- HCMC University of Technology (Vietnam)
- University of Batangas (Philippines)
- Politeknik Kesehatan Yogyakarta (Indonesia)
The above image shows a small sample of Schools going Google…
Microsoft Live@edu Deployments
Update - April 12, 2012: Microsoft Corp. and All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) announced that AICTE is deploying Microsoft Live@edu over the next three months to more than 10,000 technical colleges and institutes throughout India. The cloud deployment will expand students’ access to high-quality technical education and collaboration. Live@edu will reach to AICTE’s more than 7 million students and nearly 500,000 faculty members — roughly double the size of the Los Angeles population — making AICTE Microsoft’s largest cloud customer ever.
- University of Aberdeen (UK)
- University of Ulster (Ireland)
- Ohio State University (USA)
- Modern School Vasant Vihar New Delhi (India)
- Shree Chanakya Education Society (SCES), Pune (India)
- University of Queensland (Australia)
- The Universidad Europea de Madrid (UEM) (Spain)
- Government of the state of São Paulo, (Brazil)
- Kentucky Department of Education(USA)
- Ionis Education Group (France)
- Canadore College (Canada)
- Università della Calabria (Italy)
- Naresuan University (Thailand)
- National Aviation University (Ukrain)
One of the case study says:
“More than 10,000 schools in more than 130 countries have enrolled in Live@edu, serving tens of millions of students worldwide.”
What are the Pre-Requisites to get Enrolled
- You must own a domain name for your school/institute
- K-12 (Kindergarten through grade 12) or higher educational institution, non-profit, accredited by a generally accepted accreditation body (Required only for Google Apps Education edition)
Enroll / Sign-Up your school for
Disclaimer: I am NOT associated with Google or Microsoft. Like many of you my only association with Google is as an AdSense Publisher. My only association with Microsoft: I am a MCTS certified MS.NET C# Developer.
References
Cloud Articles
- Top 10 Cloud Computing Service Providers of 2009
- Best & Free Cloud Computing Applications
- India Based Cloud Computing Service Providers
- Kaavo: Application Centric Management & Security for Cloud Computing
- Cloud Based Project Management – DeskAway SaaS
- Develop SaaS on OrangeScape PaaS to Run on any Cloud Infrastructure
- Cloud Computing Service: A Basic Introduction – 1
- Cloud Computing: A Basic Introduction – 2
- Cloud Computing Platform Introduction – PaaS
- SaaS Introduction with Example – Cloud Service
- Cloud Computing: A Catalyst for IT adoption in SMEs/SMBs
- Microsoft leaps into the Cloud – Office Web Apps
