The digital campus cloud and the education clouds are becoming the climate

In the field of education, 2011 is considered as the "Year of opportunity" of the national higher education and educational reform, the Twelve-Five plan, put forward the instruction policy of combining education industry with information industry, and ask the national colleges and universities to do well the work of the educational industry "cloud computing service innovation and development pilot model", Cloud computing will become the core technology of talent training and innovative education in higher education in China.

Vast land, people on the "cloud" enthusiasm continues to warm up. Governments around the world have been actively promoting the first attempt by universities to create an eye-catching education cloud in the changing "cloud".

The marriage of education and cloud

The concept of "cloud" is deeply rooted

Cloud computing, as a service delivery and usage model, announces the potential for Low-cost supercomputing services. To go back to the history of cloud computing, maybe we can't really make a clear distinction between time nodes. Some people in the industry say the cloud concept has evolved over the past more than 10 years. Cloud computing, as a business computing model, emerged from the 2007. The first more explicit cloud concept is Google Inc. Cloud computing is thought to be an on-demand, scalable way to get the services it needs, either it and software, Internet-related, or any other service. Then, cloud computing as a result of the promotion of building, sharing, winning a new generation of social network perfect combination, so quickly become the focus of the industry. Since the world of cloud computing, the various manufacturers continue to join the camp, the pattern of cloud products and cloud technology flooded the market.

Behind the noise is the concept of cloud computing in the hearts of the popular, and then become the next generation of Internet core technology. Yang, Director of University Network Center, believes that cloud computing is the inevitable trend of the development of new technology, which is caused by social demand (resources, cost, energy), which provides a new business model for demand-oriented network environment. Cloud computing through the virtualization of IT resources, the existing hardware resources for dynamic allocation and management, to lease the IT resources to users, while saving the cost of input, the platform to provide virtual machines and related applications lease can also save users a lot of time. This kind of saving cost and time technology pattern obtains the user's favor, brings the huge application foreground to the platform. Education cloud, health cloud, cultural creativity cloud, agriculture cloud, business cloud, financial cloud, research cloud, etc., carry the different service mode and application system, also carry the new opportunity of productivity development.

"Cloud" brings new opportunities for education

Since the MIT launch of the Open curriculum video in 2003, Yale, Harvard, Stanford and other prestigious schools have launched Open Course Network video services, so far on the network popular elite Open course video has included every subject online resources.

Resource construction is one of the important guarantee for the realization of educational informatization, and it has a far-reaching strategic significance for the development of educational informatization in China. The application of cloud computing in the education industry will promote the sharing of educational information resources, according to a survey by the Market Research Institute. At present, the education industry has begun to implement some cloud computing projects, such as the Guangzhou University based on cloud computing infrastructure platform centralized management solutions for different users in Guangzhou University to provide a variety of resource systems and services.

From High-quality resources to education cloud construction, as a new IT service model, cloud computing is closely combined with education and teaching. Meanwhile, the different bearing form, also changing people to the education resources, based on cloud computing technology, the concept and category of educational resources expanding, computational power resources, platform resources, knowledge and skills, data resources, experience and analysis, have become more abundant extension of educational resources. Today's educational resources are no longer just digital information resources, but include computing, efficiency and environmental resources, from physical storage state to ubiquitous service delivery. The education informatization construction will appear a brand-new stratification plane, that is the education cloud to many kinds of information resources reorganization and the optimization, finally realizes the large-scale, the high efficiency resources sharing. What is the education cloud?

Although it has not yet formed a true sense of "education cloud", but some institutions have begun to study the application of education cloud, as a variety of phased results "surfaced", education cloud gradually become climate. As early as 2008, East China Normal University was concerned about the application of cloud computing in education, now with a number of enterprises to explore the architecture of education cloud design and construction, including with the IBM China Research Institute, the use of IBM's voice recognition cloud services to build a teaching video resource library, and Shanghai, China division of the Beijing Cooperation Research "Green class pass" service cloud, Cooperate with Dell to build educational services cloud pilot in China. Beijing Normal University is to construct a "teacher education digital resource Cloud service platform" for the National normal colleges and some primary and secondary schools. The educational resource platform based on cloud computing is an important part in the demonstration project of "intelligent Campus" which is being constructed by Foshan Institute of Science and Technology. Many colleges and universities are considering switching to IaaS when upgrading their network infrastructure.

No uniform definition

"The definition of the education cloud has not yet been unified. "East China Normal University education Information System Engineering Research Center director Zhiting said."

Nevertheless, there are still many people in the industry who have expressed their opinions. Liu Yan, director of Information Network Center of Beijing Normal University, thinks that the education cloud is to provide users with the resources of educational services through the cloud computing model. It is a kind of integration and development, which is related to the establishment of centralized management mode and resource integration, the establishment of public IT service and resource application in the University informatization.

Li Yunhui, director of the Department of Education and Science, Foshan Institute of Science and Technology, said that education cloud is an educational information service platform. Through the "one-stop" application and "cloud" concept, to break the educational information boundary, so that all schools, teachers and students have an available, equal platform.

Guo Qingshong, director of the Network and Information Technology center of Sun Yat-sen University, said that the education cloud is a platform and a way to provide quality education services to users by integrating ideas and techniques of educational technology, learning support services and innovative thinking.

No matter what kind of "coat" The education cloud wears, its essence is based on cloud computing architecture, in-depth integration of a variety of resources, systems, services, on-demand to provide users with rental or free services to meet users in learning, research, management, life, entertainment, social and other needs. As long as the user has the network and terminal equipment, can be like using water and electricity, whenever and wherever the need for educational resources.

What resources can users get? Lu Yiqin, Director of the Information Network Research center of South China University of Technology, said: "The resources of domestic colleges and universities are mainly focused on scientific research, teaching, educational management and style." In broad sense, the educational resources include human resources, and the non human resources are roughly divided into public and professional resources, all of which are suitable for the "cloud". ”

All the resources and systems that can be applied on the cloud platform should be covered by the education cloud. The education cloud gathers numerous applications to provide services to users. "There will be more practical applications in the future," Xiang Yunping said. "Liu Yan said.