Ravi Blogs about IT Topics

I mentioned in my previous post, that I will discuss more about the Google Apps for Education and here it is…

Google began offering Gmail for educational institutions for free through a beta test program earlier this year. Since the SPAM problems and the slowness of student webmail were issues at that time, we were exploring different venues to solve these problems and it was logical for us to look at this beta offering. I signed up for this on March 20, 2006 and discussed this with TSS staff.

The earlier versions of this offering was not as feature rich as it currently is. So, when we began analyzing it, it became apparent that the lack of LDAP integration, lack of calendaring and lack of IMAP client support were some of the weaknesses of the system and spent the next few months re-architecting the student email back end to bring in more efficiency.

After what I saw at EDUCAUSE and the fact that many institutions are taking notice and are looking at this as a serious possibility, I believe Google Apps for Education is something we should look at seriously. I also believe that this is a decision that needs to come from the students who will be affected by this decision. The role that ITS can play is to look at the Google offering, collect the facts and present them to the students to help them make this decision.

I strongly encourage you to read the details about this offering at the URL: https://www.google.com/a/edu/

Here are a few things that are relevant to this discussion:

• The commitment level from Google – how long will this remain free?
• Privacy issues – Google now has access to a lot of information that they can potentially use in ways that a user may object to but is advantageous to Google (this is why some people would argue that there is no such thing as a “free service”).
• It will be a long time before we can offer 2 GB storage per user!!!
• We currently do not offer a calendaring service to students.
• The integration of Google Talk, Calendar and Mail is really nice. And put the writely (collaborative word processing on the web), Spreadsheet, and Google Video (most likely to be integrated with YouTube) and you see a very powerful platform.
• If username@wesleyan.edu can be set up in such a way that it goes to Google and that the students are happy with this, why would we not want to do this? Administratively, we don’t have to make any changes.
• Arizona State University converted their 65,000 students to this and claim to have done Single Sign On.
• I have been a long term user of GMail and have been using all of their other tools, such as the calendar, writely and spreadsheet and have been very pleased with the architecture and the user interface.

I have asked other colleagues about this and many responses have been predictable and really not convincing. The more thoughtful ones raise the issue surrounding privacy.

So, in my mind, here are the next logical steps:

• We develop a clear understanding of what this offering is all about; how it integrates with our existing systems including single sign on; what is the administrative overhead;
• What exactly are the privacy issues surrounding this offering.
• Prepare some background material on this and open it up for discussion with student participation.
• Develop methodologies for propagating the information to students and getting feedback that is useful (for example, how do we engage different cross sections of students in helping us decide)
• Finally, Microsoft has a similar program called live@edu . Ask the same questions about it too.