Use cloud to make education more perfect and easier to operate

More than 10 years ago, Chongchong (Director of Shuguang Information Cloud computing) was a newly-engaged engineer, once he received a mission: to go to a village school in the 80 km away to repair the engine room. But when he got there, only to find out that a fan was broken, perhaps now we would feel incredible, but at that time is not normal. "Fault locating in remote areas is a very troublesome thing, the pre-contract is to repair this, and then found that is broken, you have to go back and forth several times." Chongchong said with a wry smile. "This is our" education cloud "to do the most basic things, one of the simplest description is" fat Center, Thin School ", that is, backstage completely in our here, the school end only need to simple terminal equipment is good, do not need to build servers or anything. "In the case of the Wuxi Audio-visual Museum, the dawn through the deployment of 10 enterprise-class servers, completely broke the restrictions of the region, to achieve the city education information resources centralized storage and integration." "Even relatively developed areas such as Wuxi need the cloud so much, not to mention the western regions," he said. ”

The education industry has become one of the first "landing" areas in cloud computing, but it is not difficult to understand. The scarcity of quality education resources, scattered areas, so that less developed areas of the education level is extremely low, the degree of education information is miserable. "Some schools do not have a computer room, even if there is no professional management staff, but their demand for information is very large." "Chongchong said.

There is also a dimension is the hierarchy of educational needs, in addition to the traditional education path, the current also spawned a lot of special educational needs, such as the already widespread distance education, online education. "The first is" Open University ", many people do not necessarily pass the college entrance examination to get higher education, with the cloud, he can enjoy the same education environment as college students; second, vocational education, cloud computing is particularly suitable for this kind of skills training, students can be more intuitive to understand and learn in video tutorials, and third, sustainable education, This is for everyone, and after a few years of work you may need to learn an economist or MBA, ideally, the education cloud can cover all areas of education. "In Chongchong's view, cloud computing has brought unlimited expansion of resource services and application capabilities to the education industry."

Only these two dimensions determine that education is destined to be the first burst of cloud computing, "even without consideration of costs, there is absolutely two concepts of cloud and cloud." "The dawn has undertaken the Guizhou hope Net and the provincial resources storehouse backstage constructs, this project is sufficient to explain the question." The complexity of Guizhou's geographical environment makes IT infrastructure in many areas almost zero, if the traditional network model to build, is bound to be a very expensive and construction and maintenance of a very difficult project. After deciding to adopt the cloud, the outline of the project was simple. According to the relevant person responsible for the project, after implementation, the provincial resource pool reached 3,500 courseware storage scale, and Guizhou hope that the network can support 1000 people at the same time online on-demand and download courseware resources, the day to withstand more than 1 million visitors. "The key is that the customer uses the minimum cost and the shortest period, completes each city County auxiliary education system interconnection." ”

Of course, ideally the country should have a unified cloud management platform rather than multiple regional platforms. From the point of view of data processing, scale and standardization will make the cost of data lower, but the reality is that this vast project will slow down some of the need for cloud computing in the field of rhythm. Therefore, in the twilight "Education cloud" case, most of them come from the private cloud of some educational institutions.

There are many common problems that plague these colleges and universities. For example, with the popularization of modern education technology, school management and e-mail applications are becoming more and more important, how to provide data storage for these applications is a major challenge. Moreover, even without considering the market-wide distance education, the enthusiasm of the teachers to use multimedia to assist teaching is also unusually high, but this will involve a large number of graphics, images and audio and video data. Data volumes are multiplying, and the original server storage capacity is clearly far from enough.

As a result, in cooperation with Tongji University, Sun Yat-sen and Wuhan universities, Dawn tried to use the concept of cloud to interpret a campus local area network. "Or from the perspective of application scenarios to achieve a variety of digital campus deployment, such as the academic system, campus card, digital library, multimedia classrooms." Of course, parallel to them is the core database, backup and disaster recovery, desktop virtualization and many other software support platform. "Chongchong said.

"Cloud computing is not a cool technology in itself, especially at the moment when there is not enough data to be concentrated and stored in the core business." "I've always wanted Chongchong to describe what the future education cloud would look like, but he thinks that cloud computing is definitely not a tool, and not just a way of changing how the system is built," it even changes the entire old system, the future scenario? It's hard to say, it's going to be everywhere, but you're not aware of it. ”

Information

HP: Schoolcloud

Hewlett-Packard launched its "Schoolcloud" product with education software and technology provider Classlink last year, a cloud computing solution designed specifically for the education sector.

Schoolcloud allows teachers and students to access school-provided files and applications from any computer, only through a single virtual desktop. It combines "infrastructure, software, and professional development tools designed specifically for educational design", as well as on-site professional tools to help teachers teach.

This system helps schools and regional IT departments consolidate thousands of of desktops that would otherwise require a large number of servers, and now only need to focus on a handful of servers.

Hewlett-Packard also launched the Teachnow and HP Multisea two products, the former is designed to help teachers build curriculum, using a drag-and-drop interface, Teachnow allows teachers to drag files to create a course, and the subject of other elements of the course, materials to the student's computer The latter allows students to share a virtual solution of a host with multiple keyboards and computer screens, up to 10 people.

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