| | January 20168Cloud - Wireless Infrastructure to Revolutionize the Education IndustryBy Matthew Henry, CIO and Dean of Innovative Education, LeTourneau UniversityAdvantages of cloud computing for the Education industryCloud computing is an overloaded word. I see several aspects of "cloud" computing having enormous impacts on the Education industry.First, out of the box productivity tools like Office 365 or DropBox enable faculty, staff and students to access their objects anyplace, anytime. These tools offer any device access from mobile through desktop. Additionally, many of these services offer collaboration enhancements enable teams or classes of students to work on objects together. Enabling these tools offers significant savings over the local management of a data center and related staff. Much of education today is 365/24/7, these always available tools offer access as needed. Objects available through this class of "cloud" include a wide variety from photos to PowerPoints. Second, there are "cloud" tools like Amazon's AWS and EC2. Both offer education tremendous value from archiving to development platform to workspaces. Enabling education to access tools at the click of a button. Third, there are productivity tools like Prezi, eBridge or products for project management or social media interaction. Tools like Hootsuite or even Facebook and Twitter have changed the face of marketing for the education industry. These productivity tools are in the 1,000s. Fourth, entire infrastructures like Instructure's Canvas Learning Management System while setting on AWS are resold directly to those in the education industry as services. This is the new way of doing business. I see all education industry applications falling in this space. This will eliminate the need for any education organization to have their own data center. Fifth are infrastructure related "cloud" solutions. Many of the network venders are offering cloud solutions for implementing a network on a campus. Combining this with solution support will eliminate the need for much onsite support from an IT organization beyond local break fix or AV setup/tear down. Finally, new "cloud" solutions like IBM's Bluemix will allow the education industry to enable application services at an unprecedented level. Being able to add IBM Watson dialog engines to education apps or interfaces has the potential to transform this industry.The effective and proactive use of data--To consolidate, integrate and use it to drive businessI don't know that I have a good answer for this one. We have just established or own Data Warehouse. Solutions like IBM's Bluemix or desktop offerings like Tableau remind me we have so much more to do. We tend to look at flat data like funnels or retention. In My Opinion
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