The Cloud as Foundation for Digital Education
How cloud platforms and services can support the implementation of digital curricula in schools, and why this is needed for a country to remain competitive in the future. Andreas Weiss from EuroCloud explains.
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Andreas Weiss
The increasing digitalization in all areas of life is having a massive impact on society and to a large extent on the economy and the world of work. This gives rise to an immediate need to align training measures and procedures with the constantly changing framework conditions and target demands.
In order for schools to be able to realize concrete educational concepts for the future, they need first and foremost to be equipped with sufficient agility in their internal organization of digital identities, and in their use of multimedia content and collaboration services. At the same time, they also need affordable but secure access devices, not to mention suitably-dimensioned network access.
Internet industry know-how to support realization of digital education concepts
Here, the use of cloud services is indispensable, and knowledge which has already been collated by the private sector - on integration, security requirements, data protection regulations, and interoperability - forms an important basis for the tailored application to the field of education.
Apart from pure investment considerations, in order to appropriately develop necessary infrastructures such as broadband Internet, WiFi, variable access devices, and media and presentation systems, it is also particularly important that variable running costs for the necessary cloud services and the maintenance of technical equipment are factored into the calculation.
To achieve this, educational institutions need additional support for planning investments and the use of digital platforms and services from the cloud – for example, in the form of ongoing availability of “reference concepts” appropriate to their respective requirements.
Future economic success is dependent on the right education in the present
The industry associations eco and EuroCloud will support this process in Germany and can contribute a well-founded specialist expertise to the pending discussions on what are sure to be complex issues. Taking Germany as an example: The country’s future position as an industry location will depend heavily on the digital competence of today's students and trainees. There is a substantial need for coherent concepts that can be called into play at short notice in order to shape the equipping and work of the educational institutions appropriately.
Andreas Weiss is Director of the cloud association EuroCloud Deutschland_eco e.V. since its foundation and has been active within eco since 1998. He played a key role in developing the EuroCloud Star Audit as the first cloud-specific auditing process and is part of various research and SME supporting projects like NGCert (Next Generation Certification) and Trusted Cloud. He is the co-author of both the book “Cloud Migration”, dealing with issues of quality requirements and selection criteria, and the EuroCloud Guidelines "Cloud Computing – Law, Data Protection & Compliance” and the Cloud Acceptance Study. He has recently been appointed Director of Digital Business Models in eco – Association of the Internet Industry.
