Cloud learning has been well established in education for more than a decade and continues to be a vehicle for addressing critical challenges faced by traditional educational systems. Through cloud learning, users can access and interact with services like resources, apps, databases, emails, and file services using cloud computing; offering affordances such as accessibility, personalized learning and cost efficiency for wide range of audiences, from individual educators to large scale organizations.
Opportunity Statement:
The continuous innovation in AI is recreating the ways in which we interact with the cloud. An increased reliance on the complex cloud infrastructures, and cloud-based learning services are finding ways to integrate an AI component as a value add, with this trend expecting to continue.
Resources:
https://sites.google.com/view/cloud-learning-etec522
https://www.pluralsight.com/resources/blog/leadership/how-is-the-education-industry-using-cloud-technologies
“The benefits of cloud in education are around achieving the maximum result with minimal expense.” Quoted from https://www.pluralsight.com/resources/blog/leadership/how-is-the-education-industry-using-cloud-technologies
Simply put, cloud computing makes education resources cost efficient, flexbile, accessible and scalable. It lowers threshold and let knowledge accessible to all who take the initiative to learn. Digital classroom, cloud storage, pay-as-you-go models: Schools only pay for the storage and tools they use (e.g., AWS Educate, Google Workspace for Education). most of which are already widely applied in today’s teaching content. It also reduce printing, no border /time zone limitations. I would say this is the founding block for AI or new era learning environment.
School systems were gradually – and reluctantly – shifting away from reliance on traditional print resources and towards the adoption of digital resources in the years leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic. The sudden lurch to online learning forced virtually all school systems to dramatically accelerate their use of digital resources, including cloud-based resources, and although there was a marked retrenchment to pre-pandemic usage patterns digital adoptions in K-12 schools have surged in the past 5 years.
Digital cloud-based resources are great because they can be kept up to date and content can be accessed wherever its needed. Schools have also begun investing in their hardware fleets and network infrastructure while providing educators with support and training so they can use these tools effectively. As these trends continue and cloud based resources proliferate, it will lead to a new paradigm in which AI integrations and other innovations will be able to leverage this new base layer of ubiquitous access to resources. Once things reach a tipping point there will be no going back to the way things were.