As of now, there are very few colleges in India using cloud services but the rise of e-learning and technology can cause the rise of new Cloud Campus in India. This step can ensure the growth of the Indian Higher education system and bring in positive changes into the teaching pedagogy, content delivery and value of education.
The 21st century is indeed an era of revolutions and changes. And one of the major changes that we have witnessed is the inclusion of Technology in the Education sector. Although it has helped us in many ways there are some cons too which we’ll talk about later. As for India, the coming 10 years will be very crucial as it will decide the level of growth graph that the education industry will take. And one of the major factors that will contribute towards uplifting the graph is Cloud computing and creation of Indian Colleges with cloud campuses.
What is Cloud Computing?
To define it in simpler terms, Cloud Computing is the delivery of Information Technology for example: applications, storages, communication, collaboration and infrastructure over the internet. These services are provided by the Cloud computing providers like Amazon Web Service, Microsoft Azure, and Adobe etc. Like the electricity or water that is supplied to your houses by the government, these are supplied by the Cloud computing providers according to your requirement and henceforth charged accordingly.
A lot of people use Cloud computing on daily basis and they don’t even know about it. If you use google drive for saving your photos, music or documents then you are using the Google cloud which is a public cloud available to all. Basically, Cloud Computing is a model that helps us in many ways by making our work convenient and accessible from everywhere, quickly shareable, backup and easy data recovery. Here are some ways we use Cloud computing in our regular lives:
- Storing of our data and recovery of the same at ease
- Posting stuff on Websites or blogs
- Stream audio and video
- Analyse data for patterns and make reports on it which are accessible from anywhere ad need not to be saved on our phones or computer.
How will it Help Campuses?
The number of students is growing each year and with the increase in the number of courses in colleges, this, in turn, demands a lot of manpower to monitor and maintain a smooth flow of work in the Universities. Furthermore, investing in software to maintain the continuous flow of the information can add up to the cost. Therefore, in this situation Cloud computing is a real saviour. A Campus Management Software (CMS) helps in saving resources. It helps to stay connected, access and execute anything from anywhere.
READ MORE: 15 Important Statistics And Facts About Indian Higher Education That You Never Knew
As the universities are realizing the need for a better management system, a lot of them are trying and struggling to adopt a complete cloud computing campus. It helps in cutting the investments on hardware and increases the computing power, storage capacity and accessibility and the exponentially growing data size in scientific instrumentation /simulation and Internet publishing and archiving. In addition to all this, the widespread adoption of services Computing and Web 2.0 applications is another added advantage of cloud computing.
The Cloud Computing will help to reduce the cost of the university but it also requires certain investment for its services and protection of cloud. It is a technological innovation that can totally change the face of the current Indian Higher education and help us perform better by giving us more time and saving on our resources for better and making learning tools available for a larger audience from anywhere. Here are some benefits that the Institutions will have with Cloud Computing:
- Cloud computing helps the students and teachers to access the saved data without installing it in their systems, and if the offline options are enabled then you can access these files without even an internet connection
- This also helps the students to be more organised and have a stronger grip on the technology, hence giving them practical knowledge before entering the workforce world.
- It helps the University to have a faster pace of management and gives them a golden opportunity to try the new method of teaching and help manage massive projects and workloads quite easily.
- With cloud computing, universities can open their technology infrastructures to businesses and industries for research advancements.
All in all Cloud Computing is the next big thing that will revolutionize the Indian education system. We hope that the near future will see the face of fully running Cloud campuses
What do you think about this? Do you think India will be fully Cloud computing in the coming years? Let us know in the comments.
Also Read: Re-Skilling Of Education-Technology Platform
Highly descriptive post, I loved that a lot. Will there be
a part 2?