Employment/Business Focused Applications in the Cloud. Case Study

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Randall Benson
8 years ago
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1 Employment/Business Focused Applications in the Cloud Case Study

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3 Case Study Colleges and Projects Barking and Dagenham Online Business Incubator Bolton College Chromebook Pilot Telford College of Arts & Technology Open Source App Store Project Summary These 3 projects have a business focus. Barking and Dagenham College is using Google Apps to provide benefits for learners across the whole college. It is using Google Apps in particular, in its award winning Enterprise Zone. Bolton College also uses Google Apps across the whole college with the use of Chrome books being piloted by Work Based Assessors. Telford College have developed a service for businesses enabling downloaded and supported use of open source software. Key Drivers Software licence costs. Potential of collaboration. Limitations on server capacity. Constraints to learning approaches. Limitations of buildings, Limitations of bandwidth and room utilisation issues and student software costs. Need to integrate information systems. Intended Beneficiaries Employers. Learner. Prospective learners. Partners. Staff. Impact to date and anticipated The impact of these projects includes increased accessibility to applications tools by learners and staff within college, at home and on mobile devices, together with employers. This increased flexibility is enabling efficiencies in learning and support. These projects have demonstrated this in the context of employer responsiveness. Barking and Dagenham are achieving this with Enterprise Projects. Bolton is applying this to work-based learning with strong impact on the work of assessors. Telford College are providing a cloud based software service to employers. Barking and Dagenham College: The benefits of using Google Apps for Education are now realised by our Enterprise Zone and we are now using it to communicate and manage enterprise projects. Across the college, Google Apps is proving to be an effective tool for teaching, learning and assessment, with many staff and students using it to communicate, collaborate and share resources and activities. Managers are now embedding the use of Google Apps into our working practices in cross college meetings and document updates e.g. Area Position statements. 3

4 Case Study Bolton College: Google Apps for Education is now fully integrated within the college's Personal Learning Environment (PLE) and all learners have access to Google Docs. Paperwork related to our work based learners is currently being redeveloped so it can be "googleified" enabling better sharing and collaboration with learners, employers and assessors. Fully integrated cloud based paperwork will be in place by end of June, with all partner organisations from September 13 expected to use Google accounts for tracking and authentication. Telford College of Arts & Technology: We have a website which allows the use of open source software by local businesses, backed up by technical staff who could offer expertise in configuring and the use of. The project is now complete but we continue to add software. This project was brought about due to our observation of local companies not being fully aware of what open source software can offer for far less money. The key beneficiaries are the local employers in our area and some educational establishments. Supplier engagement experiences These 3 projects relied on open source software so there were no commercial supplier related issues. Bolton College: Google Apps for Education was the only cloud solution which offered the integrated, collaborative system we wanted to implement. Integration was reasonably straight forward supported online. Telford College of Arts & Technology: We found it hard to find technical staff with the skills to train others in the use of the open source titles but eventually found a number of resources we could call upon if our in house trainer did not gain the skills quick enough. Technical Challenges Some specific technical challenges were encountered. Barking and Dagenham College: We lost connection to the internet due an issue with JANET this made access to GApps not possible via our internal network. This was for around 14 hours Bolton College: Not so far as the integration of the system, however, the SSO (single sign on) authentication to Google Chromebooks was initially problematic. Also Google Chrome OS doesn't run Microsoft Silverlight so some web services (EBS agent) are unavailable on the Chromebooks Change Management experience A main theme emerging here is the need to sell the benefits of the technology to gain buy in and the use of pilot groups to share findings and inform training. Another is the need for staff to be familiar with the specific IT systems of business clients. Bolton College: The change management strategy used was to sell the benefits of the cloud technology and what the result would be for all stakeholders and avoid talking about the technology. Culturally the organisation is resistant to change, however, selling the benefits rather than the changes seemed to help gain the buy in from staff. 4

5 Case Study Telford College of Arts and Technology: Change management has been tightly controlled within the project. However we did find that once we started to inform companies of our facility it quickly turned to how our technical staff could support their current technical facilities, which often did not need the use of open source software. This was managed accordingly and where we felt the community would benefit we took on the technical support for those establishments. Return on Investment Barking and Dagenham are able to show specific savings by demonstrating the costs they would have incurred to replicate what they have with Google. Barking and Dagenham College: To match what we have with Google we would need to purchase the following at these estimated costs: Video streaming and management ( 5K) Image bank ( 1K) Video Conferencing ( 2K) Document Storage ( 10K) Websites (eportfolios) ( 5K) Mail with Calendars with SMS notifications ( 5K) Project management tools ( 1K) Admin control and portal ( 500) Blogging ( 500) Financials ( 1K) Bolton College: We expect to identify savings on printing, staff time and postal costs. Telford College of Arts and Technology: We were able to demonstrate the savings to a local establishment of approximately 3K for an instance of Moodle delivered and managed through us. Lessons Learned Barking and Dagenham College: To purchase a secondary connection so that we can still use the internet should our main JANET connection go down. Bolton college: I would have ensured that the college was 'clear' of any audit relating to the area the project would impact on as this oversight has led to severe delays in moving the project forward. Telford College of Arts and Technology: We would have been more realistic about the readiness of employers to move to open source software. 5

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8 With thanks to all project partners who contributed to the development of this case study and consultant Chris West Association of Colleges Stedham Place, London WC1A 1HU Tel: Fax: Website:

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