The contenders

The BETT 2010 show took place at Olympia in London last week (13-16 January 2010).  As the showcase of “British education and training technology” what better place to look for emerging trends in educational ICT strategy and implementation.

So, the big questions for Educloud to ask:

• Has the potential of “utility computing” been embraced in education?
• Is everyone “on the Cloud”?
• Is the world of education now truly interconnected?

We went along to find out…

Looking for the Cloud at BETT 2010!

Unfortunately, the answer to our questions seemed to be, er, no.  Sadly not.

You see, the pace of change in the educational market is, as always, rather slow.  The majority of vendors (be it software, service or infrastructure) continue to offer evolutionary (rather than revolutionary) solutions on established platforms and pricing models.

However, all is not lost, there are pockets of change and they will gain momentum.

Two areas in particular are already well under way with a quiet revolution in progress: virtualised school desktop infrastructure and leaning platforms, portfolios and resources.

Virtualised school desktop infrastructure

A number of vendors are quietly offering very effective solutions to the problem of expensive desktop infrastructure in schools and academies.  They’re doing this in the form of Citrix thin-client desktop solutions, technology that has been round long enough in the commercial sector to be well tested and well understood.  This makes it potentially highly effective when done right.

Rather than having several hundred full Windows PCs sitting on desks in classrooms the school instead buys much cheaper “thin clients”.  These simple, low cost and easy to maintain machines then connect to a number of big terminal servers in the communications room.  This is where the applications are installed and maintenance can be kept centralised and simplified thus improving performance while reducing cost.  Potentially, a match made in heaven.

Vendors and customers (like XMA and the Guernsey States Education Department) are already talking about successful implementation of this technology.  Others are also well on the way to adoption and it is likely there will be many more success stories over the coming year.

Most interesting however from a “Cloud” point of view is the potential to roll the server element of the infrastructure off-site.  Putting this onto a utility computing platform in a large specialised data centres from the likes of Amazon and Rackspace or BSF providers like Logica offer potentially enormous gains for any-time / anywhere learning and further improved efficiency in both time and money.

Learning platforms, portfolios and resources

Many learning platforms, (e)portfolios and educational resources have actually been offered on a partial “software as a service” (SaaS) model for some time.  The change we’re seeing now is primarily around billing and hosting.

For example, the preferred delivery method of Fronter for their popular virtual learning environment (VLE) is from their dedicated hosting environment over in Oslo, Norway.  Customers simply sign up for access to the service without having to worry about running hardware and software themselves.  The VLE simply becomes another service accessed over the Internet, just like Google, Facebook or the BBC.

Likewise, the Encyclopaedia Britannica hosts all their content on-line and schools simply sign-up to use it on an annual contract with access available to staff and students from the school, home or even an Internet cafe if they want it.  No more CD-ROMs that you can only access from the school library.

The outcome

So, utility computing is not yet emerging as a reality for the majority of the education market.  However, trends are certainly shifting and the growing adoption of virtualised desktop infrastructure and resource delivery as SaaS is promising.

Of course, there is much still to be done.  The potential of virtualised applications and infrastructure that is fully cloud based and priced on a true “pay as you use” model is a long way from being realised.  We’ve a long way to go and there a many challenges and hurdles to overcome.  But, things are moving in the right direction and we at Educloud are here to ensure the move quickly with everyone on board.

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