Open University adopts Google Apps for Education.

The Open University is to give its 150,00 students access to Google Apps for Education. What does this mean for other universities? For Microsoft? For university IT departments? More from OUSEFUL

5 Comments

  1. Remember when Universities generated their own electricity because you could not trust the grid? Me neither…is now the time to move to cloud (computing) control?

  2. I don't remember this either … but it's only recently that EU countries agreed on a common plug standard and Britain is still out of line there so maybe there's some truth in that rather stretched analogy.

    I wondered if the 6.5 Gbyte email allowance was per-user or per institution.

    Also, unless you can transparently open and save word/excel/powerpoint to Google docs from the office client, it will not get much take-up from admin and academic staff.

    Still, offloading the email seems to have some merit. After all, few if any of us actually use the collaborative tools provided by Outlook and Exchange and Calendar syncing and Mail access functions can easily be set up in Outlook.

  3. Graham Atwell has posted an interesting response to the OU announcement on the Pontydysgu blog.

  4. Leigh Blackall adds his two-cents here. Looks like, after a slow start, "OU Buys into Google Apps" might be the next VLE is Dead meme.

  5. Could be good for adhoc collaboration. Research? Student groups?

    It's interesting that it seems to be for students only at the moment. Maybe the OU have IPR issues?

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