How exactly is cloud technology beneficial for higher education? What are the advantages that the students, teachers, and universities/colleges get? Here I shall mention some of the reasons cloud-based technology has proven to be beneficial for higher education.
Affordable Study Resources
No matter your specialization, you end up looking for loads of textbooks and resources to explore your interests. While you get many things for free online, some exclusive materials often cost a bomb if you want a hard copy. Of course, a physical textbook or resource has its advantages, but those resources are available digitally and are way affordable with cloud tech. This way, you can support the creators of the resource and save money as well.
Digital Payments
Let’s be real: higher education is not necessarily affordable worldwide. But the physical process of making payments is time-consuming and inconvenient. The introduction of digital payments powered by cloud technologies makes fee payment easy. It just takes a minute to pay your college fee and get your receipt.
Collaboration for Research and Studies
No matter how big a university is — collaborating with peers always limits a finite number of people nearby. Now that everything is cloud-based, one can collaborate with anyone from across the globe. All it takes is a decent Internet connection to get in touch. Not just limited to that, you can also collaborate with lots of people at a time with various collaboration tools like an online whiteboard. With the help of such collaboration tools, you can also share your research or study materials instantly. While the presence of cloud-based technology helps students and teachers collaborate quickly, it also helps universities. Considering that they have several sizable departments or campuses, they can easily deploy collaboration systems to share information across campus. This saves time for everyone and helps global innovation.
Automation
Automation is at the core of cloud technology powering the education sector. It results in various improvements overall — ranging from the ease of learning to the administrators running the institute. Everything gets easy, quick, and with less staff needed.
Efficiency
Being able to communicate over the Internet using cloud-based platforms reduces the time taken to interact. Not just efficient communication, several college-related activities and administration tasks also take much less time. Let me take the example of submitting a document at the end of a class. You just end up piling up the documents, and the college staff must organize them to store them somewhere. This takes time and has a possibility of documents getting misplaced. With online education, everyone has a separate account and a content management system setup where things get automatically organized. Overall, due to the reduced friction for communication and automation, performing tasks has significantly improved.
Flexibility
The ability to communicate, share resources, and perform various tasks from anywhere (and anytime) is exciting. And these are some of the biggest reasons cloud technology is rapidly being adopted by every industry. This brings flexibility to the higher education sector — which was not possible without cloud technology. It is now possible for universities and colleges to adjust schedules and still efficiently work with students from across the globe. Or connect with skilled teachers from a different part of the world to help improve students.
Easy Access to Resources
Everything is super accessible. You no longer have to ask a librarian or wait in a queue for a book/resource you want. Simply log in to your university portal and grab the resources available for you without wasting any time.
Cost Savings
The need for physical infrastructure (and supporting it), paying a fee for transportation, and several activities that cost money—are cut with cloud-based education. In fact, deploying a cloud-based application to ease education costs much less than building physical infrastructure to accommodate all the necessities. With all the costs saved, the university can utilize the funds to improve student’s education quality or resources. The cost savings reflect for both students and universities at various levels. So, it’s a win-win for everyone.
Data-Driven Decision Making
With cloud-based applications, the administration (or the leadership) that manages the educational institute gets access to incredibly detailed insights. Understanding operational failures and reasons for success can help leaders to come up with effective decisions.
Scalability
Scaling up the cloud infrastructure is easier than physical expansion. Physical constraints may have limited the growth of a college or university in the past. But with limitless possibilities, with cloud technology, the sky’s the limit! An educational institute can easily meet the demands of an increasing number of students and resources. And all that with reduced costs (and less time).
Privacy & Security of Data
Every student, teacher, and administrator gets all the privacy they need to work on their assignments, question papers, billing, etc. Also, information related to your personal profile and your classwork stays private to you. And with several data-access restrictions and managed firewall for the cloud, the university’s assets stay safe. This also gives the education system the ability for transparent accountability. Yes, the college administration may have access to how you use their platform, what you access, and when you do. But on an individual level, you get more privacy. And not just limited to that — the cloud stores university data with the ability to recover from any data corruption or loss. Any tampering with the data is also detectable.
Cloud Technology Promotes Innovative Education System
The education system is constantly evolving, and cloud technology makes it interesting. I am not surprised many higher education courses are already available on platforms such as Coursera, edX, and Udacity. The benefits listed here are some of the important ones. There’s more to it. Things like overcoming language barriers, cultural differences, and several other benefits are also a result of cloud technology. It is the modern driving force for the global education system, and with constant innovation, it will only get better. You may want to look at some of the best cloud hosting platforms if you consider using the cloud for education.
