Cloud for good – empowering education

In my previous posts I’ve talked about the responsibility we have, both at VMware and as an industry, to use our power, ability and knowledge of technology to do good. Having covered how technology, and in particular cloud, is helping deliver healthcare and the development of small businesses, now I want to look at how we can build a better world by supporting education.

As the Global Education Partnership detailed, education helps eradicate poverty, increases individual earnings, reduces economic inequality and promotes economic growth. By expanding someone’s knowledge, you give them the power to challenge assumptions, learn new skills and achieve more.

So where does cloud come in?

Education anywhere, any time

Resources are often cited as a major barrier to providing quality education. From teaching materials to safe, suitable classrooms, and even knowledgeable teachers, being able to properly resource schools is a challenge in the most developed of nations, never mind those countries which lack basic infrastructure.

Cloud-based education systems with their flexibility, scalability, low up-front costs and ability (with a broadband connection) to sign up and get started almost immediately, can change all that. They can allow children located miles from schools to access virtual classrooms and remote teachers, help those teachers to not only connect everyone involved with people far beyond their local communities. This in turn helps establish networks and connections which may become useful in later life.

It’s exactly the reason VIF International Education was set up. Founded in 1987, it provides an exchange program for international teachers who want to work in the United States, and offers educational programs and resources. At its heart is the Learning Center, a learning management system (LMS) that provides teachers worldwide with access to global and project-based lesson plans in multiple languages, video training, and online collaboration. When its users grew up from 1500 to 8000 in the course of the year, VIF knew it needed to move to a cloud-based platform to be able to maintain uptime and scale as required.

Moving to vCloud Air allows VIF to scale to meet foreseeable growth. “We want to plan for 80,000 and 100,000 users,” says VIF’s chief product officer Mark Otter. “We grew from 1,500 to 8,500 users over the last year. We’ve expanded from the North Carolina and Virginia area to add 28 schools in Houston and 15 schools in Kentucky. So what we’re trying to do now is get ahead of the curve from a scalability standpoint. Moving to vCloud Air positions us to deliver whatever resources are needed to grow the business.” 

As this article on Radius outlines, cloud computing enables online collaboration, allowing students and teachers to share assignments, learning materials and further reading – in other words, the transmission of ideas. Cloud storage means said materials, including documents, videos, photos and music, can be easily accessible and updated without requiring parents or education facilities to buy physical copies.

One example included in the piece mentions a project VMware and one of its partners undertook which involved the physical transportation of hardware to a remote community. While this proved a logistic challenge, once in place, thanks to cloud computing, students were able to get online and into a world they were previously denied access to.

Both of these examples showcase how technology, and particularly cloud computing, can be deployed to overcome obstacles, whether it’s reaching people on the far side of the world, or providing access to remote or disconnected locations.

Cloud for education

In this way, education truly becomes a right, available to anyone, no matter where they are or what their background. Imagine being able to get a full education, from elementary school all the way to degree level, without having to come up with the money to travel to traditional centres of learning, costs which can be prohibitive to many. Suddenly the horizon becomes limitless.

It’s beneficial to businesses too – we talk extensively about diversity and inclusion and the accompanying business benefits, and one of the obstacles to overcome is accessing the right talent with the right levels of education. With higher levels of education available more broadly, businesses suddenly have more diverse pools of talent to tap into, helping them to move away from traditional demographic silos and improve their inclusivity.

The principle is a good one – educate more widely to improve life. Yet while once it may just have been a theory, now, as technology matures, it can become a reality. It just needs the infrastructure to make it so. That’s where cloud comes in.