The Progression of Cloud Computing in Further Education Colleges
A study based on Cloud Technology projects managed by the Association of Colleges and funded by the Skills Funding Agency - 2012 - 2013
November 2013 Contents
1. Executive Summary
2. Introduction
3. Summary of Findings
4. Project Outcomes
4.1 Student and other Relationship Management in the Cloud
4.2 Finance, HR and payroll Services in the Cloud
4.3 Disaster Recovery in the Cloud
4.4 Employer/Business Focused Applications in the Cloud
4.5 Learner Focused Applications in the Cloud
4.6 Virtual Learning Environment (VLEs) in the Cloud
4.7 E-mail and Storage in the Cloud
For each of the above areas:
- Needs and Opportunities
- The Projects
- Similarities and Differences
- Details of Delivery Models, Supplier Relationships, Service Level Agreements, Project and Change Management, Impact, Savings, Sustainabilty and Expected Longer Term Impact, Replicability
5. Conclusion Executive Summary
This report describes the early experiences of 34 projects in planning and implementing the movement of selected IT applications to the cloud. It should be of value to Colleges who are considering moving applications to the cloud.
The report highlights the emerging benefits of moving to the cloud. It identifies the risks and the mitigation strategies to manage these. It shows the potential of cloud technology to meet College stakeholders’ rapidly increasing demands for IT capacity, complexity and accessibility.
The report provides a snapshot of experiences to date including early impact. The full impact of these projects will be evident in the coming months, with a follow-up research report being developed during 2014. The current report shows how Colleges are:
using cloud technology to develop Student and Other Stakeholder Relationship Management Systems in the Cloud, which integrate web applications, CRM and MIS applications. These systems provide key information to learners and record their engagement with the College from the point of enquiry onwards. This also informs parents and employers;
increasing their business efficiency through developing Finance, HR and Payroll Services in the Cloud, which enable self-service access by Curriculum Managers as well as Finance Staff;
meeting the business-critical demands of Disaster Recovery in the Cloud through agreements with cloud data centre providers and processes which include data encryption and consideration of the location of data centres;
supporting the needs of employers and learners through the development of Employer-/Business-Focused Applications in the Cloud, such as by supporting, tracking and recording work-based learning using Google Apps;
supporting anywhere/anytime learning through developing Learner-Focused Applications in the Cloud, such as virtual desktops, Google Apps and mobile learning;
migrating Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) to the Cloud, to support increased access and flexibility for learners and collaborative working between Colleges to share learning resources;
migrating Email and Storage to the Cloud, to provide greater resilience, improved access and flexibility, such as through the use of Google Mail or Microsoft Office 365.
As an overview, many of these projects are already reporting savings and these will be reviewed again in the coming months. For some, improved service is seen as the significant benefit. Colleges have experienced some challenges in upgrading their bandwidth to the levels required by their applications. Valuable experience has been gained in supplier selection including selecting cloud hosting and specialist IT partners. Some common challenges have been identified in migrating to 365 and with authentication issues generally. Experiences have been shared by Colleges who have implemented single sign-on facilities.
Some projects address increased access to learning for those with physical or learning disabilities.
Many of these projects are replicable in other Colleges. A number of projects are part of Shared Service approaches, where the development costs, overheads and benefits are shared by a group of
1 Colleges. These Colleges work to a common set of business standards and processes.
A number of Colleges have emphasised the importance of using formal project management methodologies.
This report illustrates initial findings and is naturally limited by the information available at this point in time. Many projects are ongoing and will be reviewed into 2014. The Association of Colleges (AoC) has captured information over the lifetime of the programme and further detail can be found on the AoC Policy section of the website (www.aoc.co.uk/cloud_computing). The report concludes with some areas of desirable further research. This includes the need for forensic studies of IT costs in Colleges.
2 Introduction
The context within which the projects described in this study were commissioned, funded and managed is the rapid uptake of cloud services in the public and private sectors over the last five years. In 2008, an article in The Economist noted that, ‘The rise of the cloud is more than just another platform shift that gets geeks excited. It will undoubtedly transform the information technology industry, but it will also profoundly change the way people work and companies operate’1, a statement that made clear that the maturing of cloud technologies would go on to transform business processes and have a significant impact on the economy.
The trend to the widespread adoption of cloud technologies was given further impetus by the publication of the Coalition Government’s ICT strategy in 2011. The development of the Government’s ‘G-cloud’ would, it was argued, improve efficiency, resilience and security because,
“Cloud computing delivers infrastructure, platform or software as a utility service, giving government the capability to respond to changing operational needs. The standardised cloud platform will also allow developers, especially SMEs, to generate innovative solutions.”2 As cloud technologies matured, and as government departments and agencies began to adopt cloud services, an increasing number of suppliers began to enter the market with the result that rate of adoption of cloud technologies began to increase. One result of this trend was that funding became available to allow publicly funded organisations to respond to the opportunities presented by the cloud.
The Collaboration and Shared Services Board, established by the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS), allocated £1million for cloud projects from the Shared Services Grant Fund, managed by AoC. The aim of the Board was to progress cloud computing in Colleges through the provision of funding of a range of projects.
Colleges were invited to bid for individual projects by completing an Invitation to Tender (ITT) that had been written by AoC and other partners in the Shared Services project. The ITT allowed Colleges to bid for project funding provided they met the definitions of SaaS or IaaS described below. The ITTs were assessed by independent experts, the AoC Innovation Committee and the Shared Services Board, before contracts were drawn up for the successful applicants.
A total of 36 bids were selected covering a range of projects involving Colleges and commercial suppliers. 34 projects are now running, with two that did not go ahead; these projects are being managed by the AoC project management team.
1 ‘Special Report on Corporate IT’, (The Economist, 2008) 2 Government ICT Strategy, March 2011, Crown copyright 2011, p.14
3 The purpose of this report is to review the progress of cloud computing in Further Education (FE) Colleges. This is based on the development projects which were managed by AoC and funded by the SFA from 2012 onwards.
The projects are divided into two categories:
Software as a Service (SaaS) when software and its associated data are hosted centrally by the cloud computing provider and the organisation accesses it when and where required.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) when a College effectively outsources the IT equipment used to support operations. This includes storage, hardware, servers and network components.
29 projects were funded in the Software as a Service category and five in the Infrastructure as a Service category. In practice, some projects fall into both categories.
Colleges have complemented this funding with their own resources to plan and deliver projects which meet their specific needs.
This approach has enabled the FE and sixth form College sector to gain valuable experience of a wide variety of ways of implementing cloud computing. The Colleges involved have reported the gained and expected benefits and the challenges encountered.
The projects address the following areas within a College’s operations:
Area Number of Projects Student and Other Stakeholder Relationship Management in 3 the Cloud Finance, HR and Payroll Services in the Cloud 2 Disaster Recovery 4 Employment / Business Focused Applications in the Cloud 3 Learner Focused Applications in the Cloud 9 Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) in the Cloud 7 E-mail and Storage in the Cloud 9
A number of projects are in more than one category.
For each of these areas, project outcomes have been analysed, where applicable, in terms of:
Delivery Model Supplier Relationships Project and Change Management Service Level Agreements Impact Savings Sustainability and Anticipated Impact Replicability
4 Due to the differing nature of these projects, some projects have reached completion, whilst others are still in progress. In most cases, impact and savings can only be reported fully after an appropriate period. Some of the findings in this report are therefore indicative and will be updated at a later date.
The findings are based on progress reports which Colleges have submitted at appropriate intervals as well as presentations at workshops and conferences.
The projects represent a rich variety of approaches. Where similarities and differences in findings exist, these have been identified.
5 Key Findings
Overall Benefits
This study has identified a range of clear benefits in Colleges moving selected IT services to the cIoud in the form of:
Increased flexibility
Greater and scalable capacity
Agility and innovation
Enabling a College to focus on front-line business, outsourcing what doesn’t have added value
Significant savings on staff time and equipment
The facility to move significant IT capital expenditure to operating expenditure
Risk and Mitigation
“Cloud computing is a disruptive and change technology.”
Tim Marshall, CEO, JANET and Executive Director, Technology and Infrastructure JISC at the AoC Cloud Technology Conference, 11 June 2013.
This brings a range of risks which need to be analysed and appropriate mitigation strategies devised:
Risk Mitigation Percieved security of data in the cloud Data can be safer in the cloud if due attention is paid to:
Encryption of data Service agreements with cloud hosting providers Location of data where EU legal jurisdiction applies. JISC Legal is the authority on this.
There is a single point of failure in respect Ensuring appropriate band with capacity and of the College link to the JANET network resilience. AoC is working with BIS and JANET to secure investment in infrastructure development to allow for an increase in bandwidth and the avoidance of a single point of failure for all Colleges.
6 Uncertainties in Sound business planning incorporating financial implications demand forecasting and supply planning. Forensic studies of College IT costs.
Uncertainties in the activities involved in Use of robust project planning and control moving a specific application to the cloud methodologies Use of other Colleges’ experiences Work with shared services partnerships and College consortia Uncertainties in how users will take to cloud Robust training strategies computing Well-planned change management strategies
Loss of control in working with other Ensure strong leadership buy-in Colleges in consortia or shared services Work with trusted partners partnerships Debate and subscribe to common standards and processes Underpin this with robust Service Level Agreements between the partnership and the partners
7 Detailed outcomes from Individual Projects
Cloud technology is being applied selectively in different areas. For each area the needs and opportunities have been summarised. The purpose of each project is described. Similarities and differences in approach and outcomes are highlighted. Detailed outcomes are documented in terms of:
Delivery Methods
Supplier Relationships
Service Level Agreements
Project and Change Management
Impact
Savings
Sustainability and Longer Term Impact
Replicability
4.1 Student and Other Stakeholder Relationship Management in the Cloud
Needs and Opportunities
All Colleges have a need to manage their communications and relationships with students throughout their learning journey. This includes initial engagement in marketing to prospective students and recruiting them. Thereafter, it includes regular communication at many points in the learner journey and keeping a record of that engagement. This includes student engagement and achievement with learning programmes, their satisfaction and their destination. Once they have left the College there is an on-going need to engage students as alumni. Communication and relationship management extends beyond students to parents and to employers.
Communications and relationship activities, recording and reporting are often delivered on a range of disconnected websites, management information systems and customer relationship management systems. The range of devices through which students
8 can access and communicate key information regarding their learning journey is also limited.
Cloud computing provides an opportunity to integrate the range of communications and relationship management systems and to communicate with students and other stakeholders on devices of their choice.
The Projects
Three projects were commissioned in the Relationship Management Area. These projects represent a range of different approaches and perspectives.
Brockenhurst College’s project is a collaborative project run by the Wessex Federation. A home-grown system, ‘Emily’ has played a critical role for nearly a decade now in driving forward the effectiveness of the College to recruit, support and retain their learners. Brockenhurst have now re-platformed in the cloud, using Microsoft Azure, to continue to support their learners in new, responsive and innovative ways.
Gloucestershire College’s project has been driven by the need for a single system to track and support learners on their journey onwards from first engaging with the College. This is now a much larger, more integrated and more medium term project than initially proposed. It is based on the development of a new cloud-based College website which will be integrated with Microsoft Dynamics CRM in the cloud. It will enable the delivery of personalised services to learners, employers and other stakeholders as well as capturing data on learners from the point of enquiry onwards. The website is planned to be live from November 2013 with the CRM component of the project following in February 2014. Gloucestershire College is already successfully hosting Moodle in the cloud and using student email in the cloud through Microsoft 365.
City College Coventry’s project aims to support students and communicate critical information to them. This uses cloud mobile technology to deliver an HTML5 mobile app. This includes key campus & student union information, VLE & eILP access, e-library and QR scanning. The approach enables this information to be made available on a range of mobile devices – iPhone, Android etc without the need to develop platform specific apps. This includes use of a cloud Platform and access to the app through a number of app stores.
Similarities
All projects focus on information provision to learners. Brockenhurst College and Gloucestershire College offer personalised service benefits to learners and other stakeholders. Both Brockenhurst and Gloucestershire are longer term projects which are evolving to include the different stakeholder sets – learners, staff, parents, employers.
Both are dependent on systems integration for example Brockenhurst with EBS and Gloucestershire with Unite-e.
Both are bespoke web based developments and have been developed in Microsoft environments.
9 Item Brockenhurst / Wessex Gloucestershire Development resource In-house team Digital partners Savings Savings identified at £20K per Service is key driver annum
Replication in other Other Colleges in the shared service The website is tailored to Colleges partnership could use the software the College but the once the Brockenhurst College strategic approach is specific elements are removed replicable
Delivery Modules
Brockenhurst/Wessex Education Shared Services: The delivery model used is Microsoft Azure, which enables the development of the software and its database to take place in the cloud (Infrastructure as a Platform) and the application to be hosted by Microsoft in the cloud (Infrastructure as a Service). Microsoft Azure enables the use of a wide range of Microsoft Software in the cloud, which in turn enables Wessex Education Shared Services to build upon the well-developed Microsoft expertise of the team at Brockenhurst. There is a staff view of the information on the system. This includes all key information on students, their attendance and grades. All of this is linked to EBS which is synced as a feed to SQL server data in the cloud. The following diagram illustrates the system integration involved in this project:
10 The student and parent portals enable them to view timetables and a range of other real-time information. Parents can see how their son/daughter is progressing, their attendance and where and when their exams are and the results. Putting this in the cloud has enabled the necessary scaling, particularly to provide a resilient service on exam results day where demand for access peaks considerably and abnormally.
Gloucestershire College: This is an integrated system comprising a cloud-based website hosted by Rackspace and Microsoft Dynamics CRM hosted by Microsoft. The system also includes links with College-hosted systems – UNIT-e, MIS, the Payment Gateway, Curriculum Planner (an in-house developed application) and the College intranet which is run on SharePoint. This is shown in the following diagram:
11 City College Coventry: The delivery model used is for cloud hosting of key College information services which can be accessed by students on a range of mobile devices through apps which are available from the apps stores of providers such as Apple.
The following screenshots indicate how the content of the app is displayed:
Supplier Relationships
Brockenhurst/Wessex Education Shared Services have built on the good relationships developed between Microsoft and Brockenhurst College to achieve a good working relationship with the Microsoft Azure Team.
Gloucestershire College: The digital partner is Gill Fox James with the website development carried out by Firehoop. The digital partner was selected through a tendering process.
City College Coventry: A key aspect of supplier relationships in this project is the need for the app to be accepted by service providers, such as Apple, to be included in their app stores.
Project and Change Management
The Brockenhurst/Wessex Education Shared Services project used formal project management tools and methodologies which included the Team Foundation service and Scrum. The project was well managed and the development phases were all completed on time and to the full specification. Testing through the summer period when internet usage was comparatively light (while students and staff were away from College) proved very successful. However, once staff and students were using internet resources to the full extent during September it became clear that bandwidth could not be guaranteed to ensure that the user experience accessing cloud-based resources was consistently good enough. The cloud-based system works very well. The Azure platform is robust and reliable. Unfortunately any cloud-based strategy can only be as strong as the weakest link; in this case the bandwidth on the connection has proved to be the weak link and while an upgrade has been budgeted for and ordered, there is an extensive lead time to getting this installed and running.
Gloucestershire College: The project is in its technical development stage with change
12 management processes to follow for staff use of the system. The project is managed for the College by Gill Fox James according to the College’s specification. There is a small Systems Team which includes a systems developer who handles data issues and an internal web developer.
City College Coventry: The project management activities included a full consultation with students on the information which they would like included in the app.
SLAs
Brockenhurst/Wessex Education Shared Services: Service Level Agreements (SLAs) include agreements with Microsoft in respect of Azure and will increasingly involve SLAs between Colleges and Wessex Education Shared Services Ltd for on going support and further development. Gloucestershire College: the main SLA is with the Digital Partner, Gill Fox James, who arranges SLAs with the web development and hosting companies.
City College Coventry: SLAs include agreement for hosting and with app stores for app distribution.
Impact
Brockenhurst/Wesses Education Shared Services: The impact is through:
Supporting learners in new responsive and innovative ways.
Communicating effectively and efficiently with learners.
Improving individualised marketing and applicant tracking.
New ways of working and tracking learners.
Development experience gained by project team. Student impact is to be evaluated at end of project in October 2013 and will be made available via an AoC Technology Briefing.
Gloucestershire College: Impact will be evaluated in 2014. There has been a huge buy-in and support for the development of the project enabling detailed planning to take place in a very tight timescale. This has included positive input from stakeholder groups, senior management and Governors.
City College Coventry: The key outcome of the project is the genuine enagement with the student community and developing a system which supports their needs.
13 Savings
Brockenhurst/Wessex Education Shared Services: This is largely through savings in replacing College servers at £10k per year. Final information will be available in October 2013 on completion of evaluation. During the project no new server infrastructure (physical or virtual) has been deployed on College premises. Traditionally at least one new server would have been purchased for an implementation of this sort, more likely two (data and applications delivered separately). The College can therefore estimate a cost avoidance to date of c£10,000 on hardware. In addition, support services for the infrastructure, including ensuring high availability during peak examination results period have been avoided. The College can also estimate cost avoidance of c£10,000 on support team services.
Gloucestershire College: The College has invested in this ambitious project to enable a high level of personalised service to learners and other stakeholders. It is based on the premise of “service not savings” and “better not cheaper”.
City College Coventry: To create a native mobile app on each platform would cost the College at least 50 development days per platform; for three platforms this would at least £75k.
“Access to College information portals for students is also available on the Mobile platform which should keep them up to data with College information and thereby increasing the College retention figures.”
Sustainability and expected longer term impact
Brockenhurst/Wessex Education Shared Services: The longer term impact will be in benefits to a wider set of Colleges who, in choosing to use this application through Wessex Education Shared Services, would benefit from the development that has taken place and cloud infra-structure that is available.
Gloucestershire College: The longer term impact will be to track and support students through their whole period of engagement with the College, from initial enquiry onwards. As the implementation of the project progresses this will also apply to employer and other stakeholder engagement. Hosting the website in the cloud along with the CRM will enable energy savings.
City College Coventry: The app is sustainable in the College given the cloud hosting and app store distribution.
Replicablity for the Wider FE Sector
Brockenhurst/ Wessex Education Shared Services: The software can be used for other Colleges, following removal of features which are specific to Brockenhurst College. Other Colleges have expressed an interest in this system.
Gloucestershire College: The strategy adopted by the College to specify needs and work with a digital partner to develop the project is replicable in any College. The website design is tailored to Gloucestershire College’s specific context but the structure would be applicable in other Colleges.
City College Coventry: Whilst the app is specific to the College, the development process could be replicated in other Colleges.
14 4.2 Finance, HR and Payroll Services in the Cloud
Needs and Opportunities
The main need for the delivery of efficient finance, HR and payroll services in an FE College is to provide the highest level of service combined with maximum business efficiency. This involves accurate and timely recording and reporting services to the College management, governors and other stakeholders including staff. Delivery of services requires a high level of systems functionality which, increasingly, includes self-service facilities for staff.
Cloud computing has the potential to support the maximisation of business efficiency by enabling users to access the latest software. Users, of course, are drawn from support and curriculum services.
If a shared service approach is also adopted, further efficiency gains can be achieved through single software purchases for a group of Colleges, adoption of a common set of business processes and shared use of IT and expertise.
The Projects
SISSC Ltd (Shared Services in Sussex and Surrey Colleges) comprises eight Colleges (three in Surrey and five in Sussex). It is allied to FE Sussex, a consortium of 12 post-16 Colleges in Sussex (six general FE, five sixth form and one land-based). The FE Sussex project, which is led by Northbrook College and delivered by FE Sussex and SISSC Ltd, involves the development and delivery of shared financial, HR, payroll and e-recruitment services across the Surrey and Sussex Colleges. At the time of writing, payroll services are going live in one College, with a progressive roll-out planned. The system has been tested extensively through parallel runs with historical data. A training programme is in place. Further updates on the success and impact of this project will be reported in updates of this report.
The Isle of Wight College Project is a single-College project based on running Symmetry, a finance system, in the cloud. This system went live in August/September 2013 with a roll-out to 35 staff members across College campuses. Evaluation of the use of the system will be reported in updates of this report.
Outcomes
Similarities
Both projects, Isle of Wight and FE Sussex aim for service improvements which include self-service access in departments.
Both projects anticipate significant savings. FE Sussex £75000 and Isle of Wight £18000
15 Differences
Item FE Sussex Isle of Wight Scale 8 Colleges 7000 users 1 College 20 users Training and Culture change The most significant element Users are adapting well to of the project. Agreement and the new system. conformance to common business processes and standards.
Technical Proceeding smoothly in a Initial challenges with staged manner. getting Symmetry to work fully in the Cloud and with JANET band with provision.
Replicability Can be used by any college Can be used by other within the partnership. Symmetry users.
Delivery Models
FE Sussex: The delivery model for FE Sussex, as a shared services project, is cloud hosting of finance, HR and payroll applications software and databases, supported by the SISSC Ltd team. There is a single database for each application serving all Colleges, all of which are required to implement a common set of business processes.
Isle of Wight College: The delivery model for the Isle of Wight College is cloud hosting of Sym- metry software and the College finance database.
Supplier Relationships
FE Sussex: An OJEC tendering process was used for procurement. ULCC was selected as the hosting service, through a JISC-supported process. Risks in software procurement were minimised by using a system that has been proven in the University of Sussex and Northern Ireland Colleges.
Isle of Wight: Having selected Symmetry cloud, the two main supplier challenges encountered concerned the timing of the upgrade of the JANET connection and the need for further support from Symmetry to enable functionality of specific College-based reports.
Project and Change Management
FE Sussex: “Change management has been the biggest challenge of all!”
The human element is seen as more difficult to solve than any technical problem. Systematic recording of faults and changes to specification is essential.
A training programme has been put in place across the group of Colleges for 7000 users. This training has been around the new system and moving away from paper to an online system. This
16 in turn, it is felt, will lead to a change in culture over time through changes to working practices. The software has been set up and the main complexities were around configuration, ensuring that all was set up correctly, documenting all the information in a configuration log and ensuring continuity with staff over any issues and making sure these were logged.
Isle of Wight College:
“One of our most significant issues was the conflict between the need to run our existing services whilst trying to deploy a new system at the same time. All change management meetings were successful up until the testing phase. At this point, time pressures and frustrations with delays possibly caused us to pay less attention to the details than we should have done. Some reports were missed and silly things, such as the wrong logo being ported over on the reports, were not identified in a timely manner. This has led to issues being carried over into the final version that should have been resolved prior to the live version being deployed.”
During testing it was found that several critical reports did not work correctly and this required a significant amount of reprogramming by the Symmetry consultants.
“Once this work was completed, it was found that the reports were still not running correctly and as we were heading towards the end of the College financial year, we delayed the final handover until we could be sure that the system would work from day one. The Symmetry team provided a series of test versions until we agreed that they were working fine. The rollout of the new system was carried out overnight and we closed down the old server the same day to prevent any data crossover. Unlike FE Sussex, the human element has not been a significant problem. Most staff are using the system with little requirement for long training sessions and have been up and running fairly quickly. There are some areas where staff are having issues. These are being completed via individual trainings sessions and lessons learnt are being disseminated to other staff.”
SLAs
FE Sussex: This project involves extensive SLAs between specific Colleges and SISSC Ltd and between SISSC Ltd and ULCC, the software provider and JANET.
“Ensuring watertight agreements and a collaborative atmosphere mitigated the barriers.”
Binding Solution Design Documents underpin the transition to the cloud for each application. Isle of Wight: The main SLA for this project is between the College and Symmetry, now Blueqube.
17 Impact
FE Sussex: Impact is continuously evaluated as Colleges become live on the system.
Isle of Wight College: Many staff have found the system easier to use and it is significantly faster to complete a lot of the finance processes than with the previous system. The ability to customise your own reports and to export to Excel has made budget monitoring much easier and quicker.
Savings
FE Sussex:
“We will reduce in-College servers by ten at the end of this project. Each server costs approximately £13,000 per annum to run and service. Hosting environment fees are less than half this. This will result in a £75,000 saving.”
Isle of Wight: The following savings have been identified: £2,000 software upgrade costs will no longer be required in 2013/14. £11,000 from modifications to our existing dashboard software installation that will no longer be needed 2013/14. £2,000 annual consultancy costs. £3,000 hardware replacement costs.
Total projected savings £18,000.
Staff time will be saved in the following areas:
Report writing can be completed by local managers without recourse to the finance team.
Requirement for specialist technical skills to support server-based issues will be reduced.
Sustainability and Expected Longer Term Impact
FE Sussex: Sustainability for the project is an integrated part of the business plan and SISSC will increase its reach as further Colleges and applications come on board.
Isle of Wight College:
“The Isle of Wight College is expecting the project to provide an improved financial system that will enable local managers to produce timely, relevant reports directly without the need to refer to finance staff. This will enable staff time to be used more efficiently whilst improving the quality of data to facilitate better decision making.”
Replicablity for the Wider FE Sector
FE Sussex: The ability to replicate the project in other Colleges in the group is in-built. There has been a high level of interest in the project from other Colleges who are keen to benefit from the savings the shared service can produce.
18 Isle of Wight College: The approach used here should be replicable for other single Colleges using Symmetry and general experience is of value to any College considering moving to a cloud-based solution for its financial system. The College journey will support replicability for any College moving a financial system to the cloud. Once completed, feedback will be given via the Finance Directors’ Network over issues we have experienced and how the implementation has benefitted our organisation. A case study will be completed. We anticipate inviting other interested Colleges within our sector to a presentation day to share good practice and to discuss our experiences.
19 4.3 Disaster Recovery in the Cloud
Needs and Opportunities
There has always been a need in Colleges for robust disaster recovery services. The challenge of providing on-site or College-owned off-site back-up and disaster recovery provision is increasing. Factors which influence this include the need to back up and recover an increasing amount of data and to maintain critical services. This implies ongoing server and software upgrading/ replacement and increased staff support if handled internally. A further factor is the changing nature of Colleges including increased employer engagement and involvement in federations which include academies and university technical Colleges. This increased business implies greater demands on disaster recovery services.
Moving disaster recovery services to the cloud has the potential for increasing capacity as required and sharing management charges with other users. It can also increase the security of data by removing dependence on key internal staff.
The Projects
Two projects were focused wholly on disaster recovery:
South Tyneside College
South Tyneside’s key challenge was that one third of their turnover was derived from learners in the Marine Industry located in 73 countries. This added to the disaster recovery requirements in requiring 24/7 support. The campus front-end server is replicated in the cloud. As the project is focused on disaster recovery there hasn’t been any impact yet, other than the theoretical impact that if the College were to have a disaster it would minimize its downtime. South Tyneside use Microsoft Azure for their disaster recovery service.
Walsall College
Walsall College’s key challenge was to provide robust disaster recovery in a context where their two main buildings were close together and where their responsibilities include 2 academies and a university technical College. Walsall College has integrated public and personal cloud solutions to significantly increase the resilience of their disaster recovery plan. The College is developing a seamless integration between our on-site private cloud and public cloud solutions to reduce server infrastructure replacement costs while maintaining excellent service uptime. By ensuring data integrity and availability in the event of a disaster and by making older data available for future retrieval, all users of Walsall Colleges IT infrastructure could benefit.
20 A further two projects included a significant disaster recovery activity.
Joseph Chamberlain College: This involves the back-up to the cloud, using Redstor, of all of the College’s data systems. (The other part of the project is concerned with the migration of email accounts to the cloud using Microsoft 365.)
South Devon College: This initially involves the back-up of some key servers to the cloud and then, if need be, these could be used as an option for disaster recovery. This consisted of installing Assigra software onto one of the College’s virtual servers which was responsible for creating back-ups, deduplication and uploading to the cloud data centre overnight. The second phase involved testing the disaster recovery of these servers by instructing the data centre to power on backed-up servers one by one and for the College to test each one thoroughly to prove they could be used in case of a disaster. (The second part of the project was to set up a remote farm of servers to allow students, teaching staff and remote workers to access all College systems.)
21 Outcomes
It should be noted that there is a difference between full disaster recovery and data back-up.
Similarities
All Colleges were faced with growing and more exacting demands for disaster recovery. South Tyneside College and Walsall College identified challenges and risks with their on-site provision.
The facility to release staff and equipment for other applications was a common element. Colleges anticipate significant savings in the region of £20,000 - £70,000. Project and change management was executed smoothly and limited to IT staff.
Differences
Item South Tyneside Walsall Joseph Chamberlain South Devon Cloud Host Microsoft Azure Amazon Glacier Redstor
Security Emphasis on encryption Public / Private Replication of front Integration of Selected Cloud end server in the on-site and public systems backed cloud cloud services up
Supplier Agreement with Rigorous Straight forward Worked with experiences Microsoft took a selection process Deverills as a long time as it was from many partner a first in the field suppliers
Delivery Models
South Tyneside College: This has involved using Microsoft Azure hosting and development services. Virtual machines to host and replicate all College data sets and applications servers have been created.
Walsall College: Walsall College has integrated public and personal cloud solutions to significantly increase the resilience of its disaster recovery plan. The College has developed a seamless integration between its on-site private cloud and public cloud solutions to reduce server infrastructure replacement costs while maintaining excellent service uptime. The cloud provider is Amazon Glacier.
The College required all data to be encrypted by Walsall College before it was transferred across to the cloud provider. The data is encrypted with a 448-bit data key before transfer and remains encrypted at the data centre until recovery is requested. The data centre is compliant with ISO 27001 and BS 25999. This maintains the College’s ownership of the data as it can only be read with knowledge of these encryption keys. Several software solutions were tested before settling on one that fulfilled these criteria.
22 Joseph Chamberlain College: This has involved the online back-up of College servers to Redstor servers using the Janet link. To achieve this, Redstor agents were installed on the College servers. For the larger servers, the initial back-ups were made to hard drives which were transported to Redstor with subsequent back-ups being online. Daily differential and weekly back-ups of all College servers are taking place.
South Devon College: This has involved the College working with partner, Deverills, to achieve back- up in the cloud of College servers.
Supplier Relationships
South Tyneside College: Microsoft Azure.
“Signing up with a cloud provider was significantly harder than anticipated. Whilst it appears relatively straight forward to sign up at commercial rates (i.e. only requirement being a credit card) obtaining an educational discount proved to be a challenge. Neither the resellers we were working with, nor Microsoft themselves, had a clear idea of what was required. Microsoft told us the issues we had were because we were one of the first people to sign up. This is fair enough as one of the purposes of pilots is to find and resolve issues and they do now seem to have now corrected these issues.“
The Microsoft contacts we were working with indicated that as far as they were aware we were the first educational establishment to sign up for an Azure educational contract in the UK. As a result all parties were feeling their way through the process; this resulted in delays resulting from the need to obtain clarification from Microsoft head office in the US on certain points, incorrect paperwork having been submitted etc. As a result, an activity that was expected to be quite simple turned out to be protracted and painful.
Microsoft have resolved the paperwork issues encountered. We have signed up for additional cloud contracts with them since and process was very straightforward. I know of other Colleges who’ve done the same without issue.”
Walsall College:
“We tried a variety of different cloud providers and software solutions to archive Walsall College’s data in the cloud. We settled on Amazon Glacier and have recently completed a complete upload of all important data to the cloud. Evaluation included price/GB and took into account bandwith costs. We have evaluated several cloud solutions including Crash Plan, EduServ, Amazon and Microsoft Azure. Crash Plan and Amazon Glacier were both found to be cost effective. During the course of this project pricing was continually changing and it was difficult to assess a long/medium term cost to storing our data in the cloud. Evaluating costs of different cloud providers can be difficult due to different cost structures (e.g. CPU, Memory, storage, bandwidth and I/O can all be charged in different ways).”
An important factor in the supplier decision is the location of the data centre, which should be kept in the EU for legal/access reasons. Walsall’s data on Amazon Glacier are held in Ireland.
Joseph Chamberlain College: Working with Redstor has proceeded smoothly.
South Devon College: The only significant issue was with the sign-up of a cloud contract.
23 Project and Change Management
South Tyneside College: All technical aspects of the project have proceeded well; the major lesson learnt was that the time it took to sign up for a ‘new’ service was significantly longer than expected. Hopefully, given that these issues were the result of the resellers and Microsoft not having procedures in place and having to develop them as we went along, people following us should not encounter these issues!
Walsall College: Change management was limited in this project as the College had no current long term archive solution.
Joseph Chamberlain College: IT project management for cloud back-up has proceeded smoothly.
South Devon College: Most of the changes have been related to internal IT processes and have therefore had limited impact and have only affected IT staff.
SLAs
South Tyneside College: The main SLA is between the College and Microsoft Azure.
Walsall College: The main SLA is between the College and Amazon Glacier.
Joseph Chamberlain College: The main SLA is between the College and Redstor.
South Devon College: The main SLA is between the College and cloud hosting provider.
Impact
South Tyneside College: The process and procedures developed during this project have improved the accessibility of disaster recovery provision and should reduce the workload on the team responsible for these systems. This will allow the time that the network service team currently spends monitoring and maintaining these systems to be spent on strategic objectives, such as migration to Office 365. The full impact of this should become evident over the next 9-12 months.
At present, student experience is difficult to quantify and is likely to remain so. The systems and procedures developed during this project will come into play in the event of a major disaster or IT failure at the main campus. Should this occur these facilities should ensure that the student experience has the least disruption possible. In addition, the time spent by IT staff maintaining the equipment in the onsite DR room can now be spent supporting students or implementing other projects.
Walsall College: By ensuring data integrity and availability in the event of a disaster and by
24 making older data available for future retrieval all users of Walsall Colleges IT infrastructure could benefit.
“This project has given us the option to release expensive and required on-site storage to be better utilised for other more business-critical solutions. The changes are transparent to the student but have allowed us to go back further with our archiving and data recovery should the student lose data. We have significantly improved the IT services department’s understanding of public cloud solutions and have enhanced the College’s business continuity plan with the use of cloud solutions.”
Joseph Chamberlain College:
“Online back-up is working very well. It removes the ‘techie’ aspect that is often associated with managing an in house backup solution that can consist of a number of technical components.”
South Devon College: Servers are backed up to the cloud – no local back-up is required and no tape back-up for disaster recovery. The cost of data to the cloud proved to be more expensive than expected.
Joseph Chamberlain College:
“Online back-up is working very well. It removes the ‘techie’ aspect that is often associated with managing an in house backup solution that can consist of a number of technical components.”
South Devon College: Servers are backed up to the cloud – no local back-up is required and no tape back-up for disaster recovery. The cost of data to the cloud proved to be more expensive than expected.ck-up for disaster recovery. The cost of data to the cloud proved to be more expensive than expect.
Savings
South Tyneside College:
“Currently an onsite DR room has been established on the opposite side of the campus from the server room. The current DR equipment will reach the end of its planned life in summer 2013; replacements would cost approximately £70,000. The DR room could also be reused for other purposes.”
Walsall College: Future costs savings have been estimated at around £20,000. On the last occasion we refreshed our on-site backup solution we spent approximately £24,000 on hardware plus £6500 on software. With the requirement to increase the amount of time we store back-up data we expected this cost to increase at the next refresh. Our testing and implementation shows Walsall College could save approximately £20,000 on our next back-up refresh by keeping the on-site storage to a minimum and by extending our existing refresh cycle by at least one academic year.
This project has given us the option to release expensive and required on-site storage to be better utilised for other more business-critical solutions. The changes are transparent to the student but have allowed us to go back further with our archiving and data recovery should the student lose data.
South Devon College: Data costs can accurately be calculated by the hosting company in late Autumn 2013.
25 Sustainability and Expected Longer Term Impact
South Tyneside College: Perceived concerns over use of the cloud within the College have been reduced; this has helped pave the way for the adoption of other cloud services.
Walsall College: The project has shown that the use of the cloud for hosting services which will be primarily accessed via the LAN is feasible and practical. Concerns in relation to latency and bandwidth which were raised by some staff have proven to be unfounded.
Joseph Chamberlain College and South Devon College: Smooth operation of these two projects indicates future sustainability now that cloud-based back-up solutions have been implemented.
Replicablity for the Wider FE Sector
South Tyneside College: The development process used is replicable for any College wishing to migrate data and applications servers to Microsoft Azure. South Tyneside College also produced a guide to dissaster recovery for the AoC entitled ‘Utilising the Cloud for Disaster Recovery’ www.aoc.co.uk/cloud_computing/case_studies
Walsall College: The approach is replicable for College federations wishing to use Amazon Glacier. The encryption approach should be considered by all Colleges who are backing up sensitive information in the cloud.
Joseph Chamberlain College: The approach is replicable for single Colleges wishing to implement a Redstor solution.
26 4.4 Employment -/Business-Focused Applications in the Cloud
Needs and Opportunities
Effective employer engagement by Colleges demands appropriate IT support systems. Employer engagement covers a wide range of activity including traineeships, apprenticeships, learning companies, enterprise academies and full cost delivery of tailor-made training and consultancy.
Work-based learning requires seamless communication, assessment, recording and reporting across the workplace and College elements of programmes. There is a need for collaborative management and learning between all parties involved. There are challenges in providing flexible access to information and learning for learners in the workplace. Cloud computing has the potential to enable these challenges to be overcome. At the same time, cloud computing can support work-based learners wherever they are – on the move, at home, at work or in College.
Another form of employer engagement is to enable small business to access College software tools and expertise at low cost.
A further aspect is the use of cloud-based CRM to record and report employer engagement.
The Projects
Bolton College: This project involves the use of Chromebooks and a range of Google applications by work-based assessors, in a variety of ways, to support their learners. This includes direct access to proprietary cloud-based e-portfolios, access to College VLE (Moodle) and tracking progress and assessment and attainment via Google Docs templates. This project will be evaluated finally in November 2013.
Work-based assessors from business and IT, construction, hair, beauty, care and teacher education have been provided with 3G-enabled Google Chromebook computers which use Google’s cloud-based operating system. The assessors are using the Chromebooks to access email, e-portfolios, Moodle VLE and Google Apps for education documents hosted in the cloud while attending and between work placement visits. The Training Services department are also using Google Docs to track and monitor work-placed visits.
Barking and Dagenham College: This project has focussed on the use of Google Apps and docs in embedded learning primarily in eILPs. This approach is being used in learning across the College and specifically includes use of Google Apps by the College’s enterprise learners, being those who wish to set up their own businesses.
Telford College of Arts and Technology: This project was developed due to the College’s observation of local businesses not being aware of what open source software could offer them for far less money. It involves a website which allows the use of open source software by local businesses backed up by technical staff who offer expertise in the configuration and use of this software.
Gloucestershire College: Details of this project are given in the Student and other Stakeholders Relationship Management in the Cloud section of this report. It includes plans to embed Employer Engagement CRM activity in the new integrated website/CRM system.
27 Outcomes
Similarities
There is less similarity between the experiences of these projects as they are addressing different aspects of employer engagement.
There is a common aim in using the cloud to provide good quality services to employers. Bolton College used it in the management of work-based learning, Barking and Dagenham College through Enterprise Projects and Telford College through business software and other IT support services.
Both Colleges report significant impact on the provision of more flexible services to learners, staff and employers.
Both Bolton College and Barking and Dagenham College report significant savings in both equipment and staff time.
Both Bolton College and Barking and Dagenham College are using Google Apps and Google Docs via Chromebooks and netbooks to make applications available outside and within their Colleges.
Both have had fairly straightforward project management experiences and have been quick to achieve a wide and impressive range of user benefits.
Both experienced some telecommunications challenges which impacted to a degree on continuity of service.
Differences
Item Bolton Barking and Dagenham Developement team In-house team Google Partner + in-house, including apprentices
Connectivity 3G problems at remote locations Discontinuity in JANET services
Functionality Some problems with Google N/A functionality to handle certain types of document , such as merged cells.
The Telford College project is significantly different as it uses a private cloud to support the use of Open Source Software in small businesses.
Delivery Models
Bolton College: Google supplied and hosted apps in the cloud accessed by Chromebooks.
28 Barking and Dagenham College: Google supplied and hosted apps in the cloud. Development and consultancy supplied by Damson Consulting, a Google Education Partner.
Telford College of Arts and Technology: Cloud-hosted website.
Supplier Relationships
Bolton College: Some problems were encountered with 3G access at certain work-based locations. 3G connectivity via tablet devices is not yet on a par with mobile phone reception and some areas still have limited/poor reception. Google’s inability to convert documents which include merged cells impacted on the project. The Google Drive offline trial has identified potential issues regarding digital signature validation.
Barking and Dagenham College: There were good working relationships with Damson Consulting. Connection via JANET to the internet was lost for around 14 hours and this made access to Google Apps not possible via the College internal network.
Telford College of Arts and Technology:
“We have liaised with respected FE consultants, Judges Consulting and AGM trading, to help advise on the suitability of e-learning software that could be pre-packaged and made available for our app store for the wider education community”.
Project and Change Management
Bolton College: The project has over-run original timelines due to a number of unforeseen issues, namely an internal audit which delayed the start of the project and the time it takes to ‘Googlefy’ existing Microsoft Word documents. This area was only identified after much frustration at Google’s inability to convert documents which include merged cells (something which almost all tracking and review documents contained).
In addition there were problems with 3G connectivity for the Chromebooks and the knock-on effect this had on digital signatures, as an off-line version of Google Docs which was looked into. This did not provide evidence of different users accessing the system and “signing” the documentation. Achievements include:
Chromebooks being provided to 20 work-based assessors
6 iPad minis distributed to work-based assessors as part of a Chromebook comparison trial
Conversion of existing learner review documentation for 40 qualifications into Google Doc format
29 Barking and Dagenham College: 2 e-Learning Apprentices worked in classes and in the staffroom to support the roll-out of Google Apps, including the use of 16 Chromebooks and 60 netbooks. An augmented framework for BDC-customised administrative management for the effective delivery of the Google Apps (OBI 1 project) is now tested and working as planned and includes:
automatically onboarding and off boarding of staff and student accounts which includes welcome and data migration emails
integration with Google Cloud storage for easy search ability of alumni students’ past work
Moodle integration
the visual management tool called Flash Panel, a free service for managing Google Apps
researching the roll-out to mobile devices for BYOD
The area for developing teaching, learning and assessment (Transforming Learning) is now using Google Apps (Google Sites) to promote, deliver and record good practice etc. The Enterprise Zone is now using Google Apps to promote, share and manage projects.
Telford College of Arts and Technology: Technical development proceeded smoothly. The main challenge has been business community engagement. The following activities were achieved:
A website has been created to promote and offer the services
Multiple software titles have been pre-packaged and made available to the app store
working partnerships have been created to assist with any training requirements
Liaised with Shropshire Chamber of Commerce and Enterprise to promote the services
Worked with respected FE consultants to aid delivery of VLEs.
Impact
Bolton College: The Training Services department now see the real tangible benefits Google Apps can provide to their work. After an initial sceptical reaction the team have fully bought in to the cultural changes which are required in order to implement this much-improved system of tracking. In fact they believe the use of Google Docs will be so beneficial that they have already started talking to franchise partners about them adopting it too.
One curriculum area has already adopted a cloud-based e-portfolio following the trial during the project.
Business and IT assessors are using the Chromebooks and 3G to access existing e-portfolio systems in the work place and utilise this with their learners.
Construction and Hairdressing assessors were using an electronic and paper-based version of existing documentation in tandem to assess the benefits and advantages of using the cloud-based system with both Chromebooks and iPad minis. Hairdressing assessors have now adopted the use of an e-portfolio which was initially expected to work with the iPad alone; however, this is now being used in tandem with the Chromebook due to the limitations of the iPad app for the
30 e-portfolio.
Teacher Education assessors are using dual systems along with access to Moodle VLE.
Care assessors who are less computer literate are currently using the Chromebooks and, having started to use the Google Docs, are expected to fully adopt its use from September 2013.
Barking and Dagenham College: The Enterprise Zone is now using Google Apps to manage their projects including Google+. 10 Enterprise (real world) projects were successfully delivered.
Telford College of Arts and Technology: The project has delivered its intended outputs by being able to offer open-source, pre-packaged applications via a website and the project outputs correspond with these detailed within the project. The College continues to promote and make software packages available via our app store during and after 2013. The College has successfully tendered and won three IT support contracts for:
A private school
A local community centre
A local parish council
Savings
Bolton College: Savings will provided at a later date.
Anticipated:
“Staff time – streamlined, smarter working practices will reduce the amount of staff time required per candidate. Reduced visits – saving on travel time, travel expenses and reduced carbon footprint. Green process – paper-light documentation will reduce paper costs, printing and the need for physical storage requirements.”
Barking and Dagenham College: This applies to the whole College use of Google.
“To match what we have with Google we need to purchase the following at an estimated cost of:
Video streaming and management (£5000) Image bank (£1000) Video conferencing (£2000) Document storage (£10,000) Websites (e-portfolios) (£5000) Mail with calendars with SMS notifications (£5000) Project management tools (£1000) Admin control and portal (£500) Blogging (£500) Financials (£1000)”
31 Telford College of Arts and Technology:
“The private school we currently provide IT support to do not currently have a VLE and do not have the funds to purchase a server to host the service. We are currently negotiating a hosted service which negates the need for costly server(s) and can offer support for the software, whilst offering very competitive rates for training.”
Sustainability and Expected Longer Term Impact
Bolton College: The Training Services department now see the real tangible benefits Google Apps can provide to their work. After an initial sceptical reaction the team are fully bought in to the cultural changes which are required in order to implement this much-improved system of tracking. In fact they believe the use of Google Docs will be so beneficial that they have already started talking to franchise partners about them adopting it too.
One curriculum area has already adopted a cloud-based e-portfolio following the trial during the project.
Replicablity for the Wider FE Sector
Bolton College: The Google templates which were created will be made available and the process which we went through to move to a cloud-based solution were shared during a presentation at the JISC NW RSC conference.
Barking and Dagenham College: The College will develop a Google+ community and promote and share its sites for enterprise templates to the community. It has presented its whole College use of Google Apps to a range of conferences.
32 4.5 Learner-Focused Applications in the Cloud
Needs and Opportunities
There is an ongoing and increasing need to make software and communication/collaboration tools available across College sites to mobile learners and to learners at home. As part of this there is a need to make software widely available to those with physical disabilities and learning difficulties. There is also a need for good quality multi-media learning materials to progress learner engagement.
Cloud computing has the potential to enable access to learning applications anytime, anywhere and on a range of user devices.
The Projects
Barking and Dagenham College: This project has focussed on the use of Google Apps and docs in embedded learning primarily in eILPs. This approach is being used in learning across the College.
Barnsley College: This project has provided a robust, innovative system to enable collaborative learning to take place within and external to the College and targeted information to be provided groups, students and Staff. It is based on cloud hosting of learning applications through Hub Metro and Hub Mobile, a tailored set of web applications.
Blackburn College: This provides Virtual Desktop Services to all College learners and specific services to those with learning difficulties or disabilities. This project uses Microsoft as a software service provider.
33 Grimsby Institute GIFHE Zone: As part of the College’s ILT and IT strategies it has identified the need to support the bringing of learners’ own technologies into the College network environment. This has generally been through the provision of internet access on learners’ devices. Taking this a step further, the College is now going to provide access to full College resources on learners’ devices or home PC via a ‘ cloud ‘ desktop infrastructure. This would allow the same experience on these devices as College-owned devices, and would supplement considerably the VLE which gives access to learning materials to radically enrich the learner access and control. It would give access to the full ‘College’ experience from home or mobile devices.
Leeds City College: This large project is focused on provision of ‘Classroom in the cloud’ through the use of a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure which enables access to applications by learners on mobile as well as College devices. It utilises a private cloud and is currently being trialled on one site of the College. The strategy partner is IBM Global Services working with Vissensa. The IBM server runs Hypervisor and Linux. It includes access to Collabco’s MyDay product and a Windows 8 App. This effectively means that ‘the tablet is the College’. The integration of a wide range of College services is accessed through a single sign-on facility.
North East Worcestershire College: By utilising cloud-based applications North East Worcestershire College have enabled collaborative technologies and mobile working options to help support the work of all staff and students. The funding from the AoC has allowed the College to dedicate time and resources to supporting staff and students to use these technologies and explore avenues for reducing costs by working with partners to develop our cloud-based systems. Single sign-on has allowed staff and students access to over 40 resources, not just the cloud-based storage and email. This has reduced the amount of training required to access resources and removed some of the pressure off LRC staff in helping users locate usernames and passwords for the various tools.
Oxford and Cherwell College: This project involves the use of a video platform to pilot flipped learning in Hair & Beauty and Hospitality at the College.
South Devon College: This project, which was part of a wider project, was to set up a remote farm of servers to allow students, teaching staff and remote workers to access all College systems. The College worked closely with Deverills, an IT consultant, to implement a farm.
Warrington Collegiate Institute: This project involves the use of VMware to enable all College learning applications to be available across the College and at remote sites.
Outcomes
Similarities
The common characteristic of these projects is the use of the cloud to provide increased access to learning applications across College sites, at remote sites and at home. A variety of approaches have been used to achieve this and a range of benefits have been derived. The majority of these projects are longer term in that they are evolving to add further learning applications, support different groups of learners and on an increasing range of devices.
All projects have achieved some early impact with strong potential for more.
34 Differences
There are a range of different delivery methods:
Barking & Dagenham College, Grimsby College and North East Worcestershire have used Google Apps. Barnsley College has used SharePoint to deliver bespoke web solutions. Blackburn College, Leeds College and Warrington College have used different forms of virtual desktop approaches. Oxford and Cherwell’s project is focused on video learning resources and uses Kaltura.
Some Colleges are using public cloud solutions whilst others are based on private cloud solutions, based in a College but serving other sites, remote locations and home access. In some cases the use of a private cloud is an interim measure prior to using a public cloud. Two projects at Leeds City College and North East Worcestershire focus significantly on single sign-in facilities.
The Blackburn College project has a specific focus on making learning applications available widely to those with learning or physical disabilities.
A number of projects at Barking & Dagenham College, Leeds City College and North East Worcestershire have significantly involved development partners.
Warrington College experienced significant challenges with upgrading JANET bandwith. Some Colleges such as Barnsley College expect minimal savings but a much improved service whilst other such as Leeds City College, Grimsby College and North East Worcestershire College are experiencing and planning significant savings. These savings include PC replacement where thin clients are used, server replacement and staff savings.
Some Colleges, such as North East Worcestershire College, have included email facilities.
A number of projects, such as Barnsley College and Leeds City College, integrate student relationship management with Learning Support.
Leeds City College made significant use of formal project management methodology – PRINCE2.
Delivery Models
Barking and Dagenham College: Google cloud hosting of Google Apps.
Barnsley College: Cloud hosting of College learning applications for College, home and mobile access (Hub Core, Hub Metro, Hub Mobile) using SharePoint.
Blackburn College: Using Microsoft Remote desktop services to provide access to remote applications and remote sessions for full desktops.
Grimsby Institute: This includes a Remote Desktop Protocol. There is use of thin clients in College with the desktop available on students’ mobiles and other devices. It includes the use of Google Apps and Google Mail. Students may use their own devices in College, which is supported by enhanced Wi-Fi.
35 North East Worcestershire College: The work has centred around the implantation of the system to allow single sign-on access to a number of resources and email management system.
“This was broken down into two phases – phase one saw the creation of a shibboleth solution alongside a cloud-based single sign-on applications server allowing all users access to a variety of resources including the Colleges VLE, Intranet and library resources. Phase two saw the integration of our Google Apps domain with the shibboleth server to allow for complete single sign-on to all resources. This now enables users to collect email, upload, create and share documents from any internet-enabled computer or device and have transparent and speedy access to the College’s other online resources”.
In terms of development internally the team has worked to support the creation of a number of resources to help staff adjust to the new document management tools, this included handouts and online video guides showing the features and benefits of the Google Apps suite.
“As we rolled out the offer to College leadership we spent a good deal of time organising one- to-one training sessions to show how their mobile devices (primarily iPads and iPhones) could be used to access and create content on the move. This has now been expanded across the College with departmental meetings being used as informal training sessions to launch the new features within departments from late February.”
“There is still some work to do around the creation of the staff intranet such as some issues around ownership and who can edit what. Unlike the previous intranet which was ‘static’ by utilising the site’s functionality within Apps, we now have the ability to allow users to interact and take responsibility which is really helping drive improvements in the accuracy of the information now shared.”
Oxford and Cherwell College: Use of the Kaltura video platform in conjunction with Moodle.
South Devon College: Remote desktop server.
Warrington Collegiate Institute: Private cloud.
Supplier Relationships Barking and Dagenham: The College linked with a Google Education partner, Damson Consulting. The College lost connection to the internet due an issue with JANET and – this made access to Google Apps not possible via our internal network for around 14 hours.
Barnsley College: Worked with a software development partner.
North East Worcestershire College:
“There were issues finding a reliable and reputable provider to work with. There were some horror stories out there. Using the JISC Community of Practice helped find a supplier based on recommendations and real life project work completed.”
36 Oxford and Cherwell: Kaltura video hosting system.
Be aware of the sales pitch for the product – you are promised the earth and then you may find not yet developed in platform
Identify if IT Services can install, configure and have resource capacity to support project requirements
Test usability on all browsers and devices to ensure anytime, anywhere access is available
Project plan with consideration of ‘testing’ on each phase of implementation
South Devon: Deverills.
Warrington Collegiate Institute: The College experienced considerable difficulties with the timely securing of upgraded bandwidth and the necessary routers.
Project and Change Management
Barnsley College: The system was developed in consultation with students and includes access to MyDay, timetables, e-payments, VLE and email. Promotion and training to all staff of the functions and abilities took place in June / July. The following activities have been achieved:
Promotion to students of the site in September, and the eLearning tutorial on how to use; to date (1st October 2013) 48% of full-time students have viewed this tutorial.
Site heavily used by both students and staff - 358,978 page views to date (1st October 2013).
Barnsley College have undertaken a series of meeting with the software provider to discuss and to agree the planning and finalising of the software specifications for the development of the HubMetro V3.
A development and build timeline is in place and work is on time.
Blackburn College: The team have worked with all concerned to find a solution which best fits all the staff and student needs rather than adopt a piecemeal approach. The VDI system has been complex to develop in order to manage both the staff and student areas and ensure that they are both given priority.
Grimsby Institute: There were initial issues based around setting up of remote desktop infrastructure. Best practice guides did not work for us in practice. Issues around printing set-ups caused a big performance issue to start with.
“Some internal pressures meant we could not dedicate enough time to the testing phase so ended up having to ‘test’ in a live environment which was not ideal.”
Leeds City College: Planning, communication and detailed project management (PRINCE2 aspects) were identified as extremely important. Engaging stakeholders at an early stage is also important.
North East Worcestershire College: Change management was done through a series of pilot
37 groups focusing on different features of the product. This information was then shared with the whole organisation to allow all to see the pros and cons of each tool; this was also then linked to training and support materials.
“Staff were initially wary of using a cloud-based service to host files and were worried about issues of access - could they get them all the time etc. Initially we did Google Apps training as one thing but realised quickly we had to break down each individual element and work on supporting staff on each element of the app family.”
Oxford and Cherwell College: The development of materials using Kaltura and Moodle has been delayed due to technical issues and support for installation of the plug-in. This has delayed the roll out of the platform to the whole College. However the evaluations and discussions with curriculum areas has highlighted the importance of visual learning and a managed platform for delivery of the content. The emphasis of the project outcome changed to reflect this technical problem and development focused more on teaching and learning pedagogy rather than platform delivery to the whole College.
Warrington Collegiate Institute: Having finalised a Dell VMware View Centre, there has been a progressive roll-out of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Licences and Virtual machines. This includes on-site and off-site use. Users include Finance, Exams, Autocad and Multimedia students. Staff and students are using virtual machines from home. The project has been particularly successful in supporting students and staff at Orford Park, a new College centre on a site shared with Warrington Borough Council. Users at Orford Park can access virtual machines as if they were on College premises. New starters think that the system is fantastic.
Impact
Barking and Dagenham College: See entry in Section 4.4 – Employment-/Business-Focused Applications in the Cloud
Barnsley College: The project is expected to have greater impact in the 2013-14 academic year when students will be heavily using the system and resources.
The project needs to fully test and stress-test the system to ensure that it will meet the needs of our staff and students.
Blackburn College: The service will support our wide range of students who all have different needs and widen the facilities available beyond designated classrooms and IT suites. In particular the VDI will provide additional support to students who require specific software due to a learning difficulty and/or disability.
Grimsby Institute:
“Student experience has generally been positive. Using the thin client technology we have been able to reduce log on times in our Learning Centre by 75%. We are also able to provide access to the latest software through a single point of deployment ensuring we can respond to changing curriculum needs. Further feedback will be provided when the external access part of the project goes live.”
Leeds City College: Positive initial feedback has been received already, with students accessing a ‘virtual desktop’ and ‘applications housed on a virtual desktop from College-owned devices and their own mobile devices. Students are now gaining a rich social learning experience gaining
38 a technology immersive experience using their own device, interacting during a lesson in a controlled environment.
Global accessibility is allowing learning on demand accessing College systems and software when and where they choose on any web-enabled device.
North East Worcestershire College: Cloud-based storage is now available for students and staff to upload, create and share documents. This approach extends to mobile devices and is enabling paperless assignment submission and feedback both within and outside the VLE. With storage being at 5GB and accessed through single sign-on, there is a reduction in the need for user training and support.
The use of cloud-based email storage has enabled the College to remove the exchange server, use Google Vault for back-ups, reduce the storage requirements by 600GB and back-up times by two hours each evening.
Oxford and Cherwell College:
Students engaged well with video content for learning and flipped learning good practice identified
Platform allowed control and managed environment for specific selection of video sharing and keeping students focused on tasks
Peer-to-peer learning taking place and students collaborating on techniques and experiences
Demonstrations to re-enforce learning effective method of engaging, motivating and supporting student progression
Bank of videos can be re-purposed and used to show techniques for future teaching & learning.
South Devon College:
“Learners at remote sites can access the same software as those in College. Users have now got access to all applications and resources at the main site which means they can be more efficient. New or prospective students can take initial assessments at local centres rather than having to travel many miles to complete and results/advice can be given instantly. Remote desktop services have enabled us to easily install and deliver applications, access to resources and information to users at all our remote sites. The implementation was relatively easy and because of the investment we have put into our virtual environment costs were minimal as far as software and hardware were concerned”.
Warrington Collegiate Institute:
“Vmware has been crucial to allowing the development and successful usage of Orford Jubilee Park as a learning site for the Sports Department. It effectively allows students to access their information, work and emails.”
Having students’ work, notes, assessments and resources available at their fingertips, independent of location, has made a significant impact on the College’s ability to support them. Furthermore, students can now access industry-standard specialist software, such as Photoshop or
39 Dreamweaver, from wherever they are and whenever they need it. Staff are gaining further advantage by accessing software such as this as wel as student achievement data from outside the College.
Savings
Barking and Dagenham College: See Savings section in Employment/Business area section 4.3
Barnsley College:
“There will be an electricity saving from not providing a dedicated server (approximately £1000/ year). There will be a saving on support costs as the use of the cloud puts no additional pressure on IT support.”
This will be updated in June 2014.
Grimsby Institute:
“We are the 14th largest College in the country, operating from 14 sites. As we support more BYOT the costs to the organisation reduce (virtual centres and shared accessible resources) as we will not be required to upgrade or install more PC-based systems as we will support student’s own devices. This project would also be a catalyst for looking at Virtual Desktop Infrastructure solutions to further reduce the total cost of ownership, improve access and achieve step change in resource efficiency.”
Leeds City College:
“In-house costs in Year 1 to deploy a local virtualised solution: £140,000 - Data centre infrastructure and running costs £500,000 - - Virtual desktop licenses £105,000 - Microsoft licenses TOTAL - £745,000
Anticipated ‘cloud’ costs in Year 1 = £194,700 - total cost. COST SAVINGS of £550,300 would be achieved with a cloud solution.”
North East Worcestershire College: Cost reduction has been achieved in server maintenance and overheads through reduction in reliance on on-site storage and email servers. There is a potential reduction in printing costs through the use of collaboration tools.
Estimated savings of £480 per year have been achieved through the removal of two servers used for the through
40 exchange and intranet platforms. Savings have also been made in removing DR maintenance agreements and maintenance supplied by the in-house IT Team. Further savings of £3000 per year have been achieved removing reliance on the current library authentication software.
Oxford and Cherwell College:
“Savings would be made against the cost of additional hardware to store future data, provide a cost reduction through fewer devices to store data on, requiring less power. Savings against man hours of managing video data in multiple locations, less searching of systems for videos. Teachers will be able to re-purpose and re-use materials and use across curriculum areas saving on development time, which increases quality and standards across the group of a seamless curriculum design.”
To be reviewed further in 2014.
Sustainability and Expected Longer Term Impact
Grimsby Institute: There is a sustainable IT agenda: To provide technologies that can reduce power consumption and reduce running costs. The trial for this is running with 52 thin client machines in our FE Learning Centre, and 16 thin client machines running in our new Sports Centre. These machines connect to our cloud desktop. Since September 2012 we have had 8000+ log-ins to the system.
South Devon College: The Remote Desktop Service implementation is highly scalable and has the potential to be rolled out across not only all our current and future remote sites but also the main campus which could mean that our present rolling replacement programme of desktop PCs could easily be extended. This would not only reduce the cost of replacement but would also reduce our carbon footprint.
Replicablity for the Wider FE Sector
Grimsby Institute: The College is available for other institutions to discuss the process we implemented, pitfalls we encountered and general sharing of good practice.
Leeds City College: Information sharing through video conferencing, web demonstration sessions, and reports made available to the wider audience. IBM have worked on a similar project at Birmingham Metropolitan College.
41 4.6 VLE in the Cloud
Needs and Opportunities
Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) are used extensively by further education Colleges. Many VLEs have been hosted by Colleges themselves. Whilst providing control and flexibility, hosting VLEs within Colleges requires servers and staffing. There is also a need to integrate VLEs with other College systems such as MIS. Colleges have increasingly been hosting VLEs in the cloud, which has the potential to increase systems’ resilience and enable integration whilst saving costs.
The Projects
Exeter College: This project involves large-scale hosting of a new Moodle in the cloud to sit alongside the College’s SharePoint portal. A first stage was to migrate the existing VLE to the cloud.
Hereford College of Technology with the Royal National College for the Blind:
“This project involves cloud hosting of Moodle for partially sighted learners. We are helping visually impaired people to access Moodle and other websites or applications regardless of the device they are using and whether they have existing enabling software available. College IT departments are also benefitting from not having to install enabling software on every PC that might be used by a visually impaired person and instead provisioning the software as a service from the cloud”.
New College Durham: The move was to a hosted Blackboard site where the College would get the benefits of software updates made by the supplier on request. This would mean some removal of risk to the College when maintenance is being carried out. Offsite hosting also greatly mitigates against disaster recovery/business continuity risks.
The existing VLE (Blackboard) was used to share course information and learning materials and for communication between teaching staff and students. The College did not want to change the way the VLE worked so we had to ensure the transition from internal system to external hosting was seamless.
Nescot and Greenwich College: This project is a shared service cloud computing project between Greenwich Community College and Nescot. The Colleges have existing shared service working arrangements in the areas of finance, IT, staff development and senior management. The project sought to establish a high quality shared VLE cloud based around common Moodle course development. Technical issues such as synchronised login across different hosting providers have been managed effectively. Common areas for the development of shared eLearning resources have been agreed (Employability, Study Skills and GCSE Maths and English) have been developed with specialist support from a high-quality online provider.
Project led by Portsmouth College involving six Colleges in total: This project involves six sixth form Colleges sharing access and development of Moodle in a private cloud. Initially it is focused on the teaching of A Level Physics in a context of scarcity of staffing and teaching resources.
Swindon College: Moodle & Mahara hosted in the cloud.
Wigan and Leigh College: Moodle and e-portfolio hosted in the cloud.
42 Outcomes
Similarities
All projects involved are moving a College VLE, often with an e-portfolio, into a public or private cloud.
One project, New College Durham, was based on Blackboard, with the rest being Moodle.
Whilst it is early to confirm benefits, a number of projects have experienced these. Hereford College and New College Durham have confirmed ease of use of their new systems. Hereford have reported a good experience in developing the system in the cloud.
A number of projects reported staff having to adjust to working practices where they had less access to the VLE on the server. New College Durham users needed some time to get used to the new system.
Differences
Four projects - Exeter College, New College Durham, Swindon College and Wigan and Leigh College - involved moving or redeveloping a single College VLE to the cloud.
Three projects - Hereford/Royal National College for the Blind, Nescot/Greenwich and Portsmouth College (Solent Sixth Form Colleges) - involved collaborative working between Colleges to deliver specific learning gains. The Hereford Project involved making learning materials available on Moodle for visually impaired learners. The Nescot project involved the sharing of the development and use of specific learning materials e.g. in Maths. The Portsmouth College Project involves the sharing of A level Physics teaching and materials between the Colleges against a background of scarcity of staff and learning resources.
Hereford and Nescot have experienced particularly productive collaborative working given that these projects are based on already established partnerships. The Solent Colleges have had positive experience against a background of needing to do detailed work on agreeing common syllabuses etc. The Nescot and Portsmouth projects utilise private clouds, whilst the others are public clouds. The Swindon and Wigan and Leigh VLEs are hosted by ULCC. New College work with Blackboard as a partner. Hereford work with Webanywhere and Nescot with Synergy Learning, who are established Moodle Partners.
Portsmouth College have identified security as a key issue when working in a collaborative context The technical implementation of these projects has been uniformly smooth. Exeter College have encountered a challenge with LDAP authentication, which relates to integration with their SharePoint system. The New College Durham implementation was straightforward given that Blackboard is both VLE provider and development partner.
Exeter College have identified a need to pay high attention to the interdependency of SLAs especially when these are the responsibility of a development partner. New College Durham reported the need for agreements on personal data protection, when integrating the system with UNIT-e, and that Blackboard had standard agreement for these situations. Hereford reported savings on servers in both Colleges. Some Colleges reported a reduction in staff time in removing the need to support VLEs on local servers.
43 Delivery Models
Exeter College: Moodle hosted in the cloud to sit alongside the College’s existing SharePoint Portal.
Hereford College of Technology/RNC: Cloud hosting of Moodle for partially sighted students. New College Durham: Blackboard in the cloud.
Nescot and Greenwich College: Private cloud sharing of Moodle system and teaching materials.
Portsmouth College: Private cloud sharing A Level Physics teaching materials and teachers. Swindon College: Moodle hosted by ULCC in the cloud.
Wigan and Leigh College: Moodle hosted by ULCC in the cloud.
Supplier Relationships
Exeter College: The College experienced some challenges with the chain of suppliers in achieving the required functionality.
Hereford College of Technology and RNC: Third party support company Webanywhere has set up Moodle 2.4 in the cloud and migrated Moodle 1.9 data into it ready for user testing and training. Three days were spent discussing the look and feel of the new Moodle.
Nescot and Greenwich Community College working with Moodle Partner Synergy Learning: Procurement process complete as per the College’s financial regulations. Following interviews and presentations, Synergy Learning were selected to host and to develop the shared cloud VLE Portal between GCC and Nescot and to develop the course(s).
New College Durham: Working with Blackboard.
Swindon College: Moodle hosted in the cloud, with Mahara, by ULCC.
Wigan & Leigh College: ULCC issues with staff leaving.
Project and Change Management
Exeter College: The College has selected its cloud hosting partner and migrated the existing Moodle to the V. It is currently implementing the main project which is to create a new cloud -hosted Moodle to sit alongside the SharePoint Portal. The functional and technical aspects
44 of this new cloud -hosted Moodle have been specified. The specification includes essential systems integration and security requirements. Partners were selected through use of the HRC3 Framework (the Procurement Framework devised by Hertford Regional College).
The College encountered two challenges, which it has needed to resolve with its supply chain. These were:
Unexpected security concerns surrounding LDAP authentication to the College’s Active Directory
The need for the College to be able to access some administrative functions of the Moodle instance in order to match the level of control enjoyed when using a locally hosted instance.
Solutions have now been agreed and the cloud -hosted ’production’ Moodle system is expected to be live by the end of the Autumn Term 2013.
Hereford College of Technology and RNC: The existing VLE has been live, hosted in Iceland since October, and is working very well for staff and learners. No issues have been encountered due to it being cloud based. The VLE is accessible by partially sighted learners on PCs. Specialist software lists for each device type have been compiled. Specialist software website has been built and is active. Live speech from website is active. HCT online VLE is now running on Moodle 2.4.
Nescot and Greenwich Community College: Technical implementation has been relatively trouble free. Shared resources development and content availability have been worked on. Shared service approach has been successful to date and builds on existing shared services links. Synergy with other collaborative partners is being achieved e.g. NCFE and REED for Employability course development.
SLAs
Exeter College: There is a need for clarity of who is responsible for what, and the interdependence of SLAs is paramount where the SaaS partner is dependent upon third parties.
New College Durham: Standard Blackboard SLA covers all needs.
Impact
Exeter College: The existing, populated Moodle environment has been migrated to cloud and is in production yielding experience of relocation and managing a cloud-hosted service. So far this is serving over 48 courses. There has been significant engagement of teaching practitioners involved in evolving new design. The specification for production environment and integration strategy has been generated. Partners have been selected and implementation planning completed. The cloud -hosted production environment has been implemented. The practitioner training programme has been delivered and revised authentication strategy agreed and implementation planned. An improved understanding of administrative functionality has been gained.
Hereford College of Technology and RNC: Innovative use of cloud-based SaaS has been achieved to provide enabling software to end users without having to install on all machines those users might possibly use. Basic Moodle accessibility is available even from clients with no enabling soft- ware available. There is a layer to suggest available options (both free and chargeable) based on detected device, including instructions. Cloud-based Moodle has had no negative impact on
45 performance from within or outside the College. There are fewer calls to the IT support team.
Nescot and Greenwich Community College: The shared cloud -based VLE is now live and account synchronisation and seamless login has been implemented. The College is now focussing on the development and implementation of a set of common courses in: Study Skills, Employability and GCSE in Maths and English. These courses are critically important to both Colleges. Independent learning for Maths and English has been highlighted in the new OfSTED Common Inspection Framework. The development of employability skills is a priority for both Colleges. Moreover, Nescot has recently established the REED centre in partnership with REED-NCEF.
Swindon College: Significant project activities including auditing courses for Moodle content and use. This is being used inform training. The use of a shared server at ULCC can impact on speed at certain times and plans to move to a dedicated server are being investigated.
New College Durham: College staff had to get used to differences in the new version software, particularly new data structures. The export and upload of regular outputs from the College’s student database was addressed at this stage culminating in the integration of the managed hosting environment with our student information system UNIT-e.
Consideration was also given to the sharing of personal (student) data with the external host. However, the College did not need to draft a data sharing agreement as Blackboard had already provided a standard declaration for the two parties to sign.
Portsmouth College: A key issue for the development of multi-user systems has been that of security, ensuring that users can upload materials without the risk of others overwriting or amending. To overcome this, a different configuration has been developed with each partner having full read-write access to their own designated iteration and read access only to those for other partners.
When common content is approved, it will then be copied from partner locations to a common area which will then be available to download to local student access versions.
Systems are now up and running with usernames/passwords distributed to all subject teaching staff.
Exeter College:
“We will be able to evaluate savings when we have fully and successfully implemented the production environment which we now anticipate to be during November.”
Swindon College & Wigan and Leigh College: Impact will be evaluated during Autumn 2013 into the beginning of 2014.
Savings
Hereford College of Technology and RNC:
“The cost of running the cloud VLE will be similar to that in-house taking into account the extra JANET capacity required and service contracts. Centralising enabling software will reduce licensing and support costs by around £5000pa across both Colleges whilst reducing student software costs. We expect to realise these cost savings in the 2013/14 academic year.”
46 Sustainability and Expected Longer Term Impact
All of these projects are sustainable in terms of the scope to add further content, increase reach and facilitate further collaborative learning. The projects that are in the public cloud will support energy savings and reduced hosting overheads.
Replicablity for the Wider FE Sector
All of these projects are replicable in the wider sector as they involve a range of approaches to migrating VLE to cloud in a number of different contexts.
47 4.7 Email and Storage in the Cloud
Needs and Opportunities
Colleges are experiencing increasing demands for email accounts and associated personal storage for both students and staff. Colleges also experience high staff support overheads for email and storage requirements. Storage allocation to students and staff is often limited by the capacity of in-house servers. Support requirements for email and storage are 24/7 which can pose challenges to College IT teams.
Cloud technology provides the opportunity to outsource email and storage to the cloud. This brings the opportunity to upgrade storage allocations as and when required, for 24/7 support to be provided and to enable collaborative working.
The Projects
Accrington & Rossendale College: This is a collaborative procurement project to migrate from traditional, low capacity, on-premise email and storage provision to the Office 365 cloud delivered platform.
“Office 365 gives our learners the resources that we couldn’t have provided economically prior to the implementation – more storage capacity in the cloud and the ability to access their data from anywhere and on mobile devices. Losing their work on pen drives that go astray is a thing of the past!”
East Riding College: This project involves the movement of email to Office 365 in the cloud.
Exeter College: Faced with ever-increasing demand for storage and access to productivity applications and data, anytime, anyplace, this project aims to ensure students’ expectations are met without the need to add further hardware in-house. The College data centres are at capacity and it is hoped that this project will mark the beginning of a process of moving a significant proportion of the College’s systems to cloud-hosted environments. In turn we anticipate improved business efficiency and user experience. Grimsby Institute: This project involves student email in the cloud. Email is now swapped to Google Mail. This opens up other Google Apps for students to use - such as Google Docs etc. This swap will allow easier student access to email on their own devices. The adoption of Google Mail and Google Apps has gone really well. We are currently averaging around 350 unique users of the system daily. To facilitate our cloud desktop, a new email system was set up for our learners. Google Mail also allows access to Google Apps -
48 giving our learners access to feature-rich collaboration tools, all hosted in the cloud. At present we have 16,000 accounts on Google, averaging around 1300 logons per day.
Hartlepool College: The College engaged initially in a cloud-based email selection process. There was a student-centred exercise to select between Google and Microsoft 365. The majority preferred 365. Email has been migrated to Office 365.
Highbury College: This IaaS project encompasses but goes beyond email and storage in the cloud. It involves progressive migration of College IT services to an Eduserve cloud. Highbury College was working with Eduserve initially to replace a secondary data centre with a cloud solution and ultimately to move specific applications to the cloud. This project is enabling Eduserve to ‘feeltheir way’ towards the cloud services they might offer to Colleges.
The College has good senior management buy-in to this project. The project is focused on the conversion of VMware to the Eduserve environment. The cloud environment replicates the VMware of the College at the Eduserve Swindon Data Centre. This was against a background of the current challenges of replication of this at the College having heavy overheads.
Northampton College: The original plan was to implement Live@Edu with Microsoft. Subsequently Microsoft decided to discontinue Live@Edu and replace it with Office365 instead. The College sought to implement a 365 solution.
North East Worcestershire College: This project involves cloud -based email and storage and other applications, including VLE, supported by single sign-on.
Reaseheath College: This project involves anytime, anywhere access to emails, Microsoft Office applications and SharePoint.
Xaverian College: This project involves the College utilising Office 365 as a cloud-based solution to support students work independently through the use of online technologies.
Outcomes
Similarities
Six projects - Accrington, East Riding, Northampton, Reaseheath and Xaverian Colleges - were concerned with migration to Microsoft Office 365 email and storage in the cloud.
Two projects – Grimsby and North East Worcestershire College - involved Google Mail.
A larger infra-structure project, focused on replacement of a secondary data centre, at Highbury College involved the planned migration of all of the College’s IT services to the cloud.
The Hartlepool College project included a consultation with students to select between Google Mail and Office 365.
Accrington, Hartlepool, North East Worcestershire and Reaseheath Colleges all report significant savings on servers and associated energy reductions.
49 Differences
Three out of the five Microsoft Office 365 projects reported smooth implementation. East Riding and Northampton encountered challenges and have resorted to alternative solutions. The East Riding challenge was in the complexities of introducing 365, in that it didn’t support the Microsoft Forefront Identity Manager FIM and that the SkyDrive offering is currently more suitable for staff and student use of web applications and off-site storage. East Riding is using SkyDrive whilst awaiting 365/SharePoint updates. Northampton set up Live@Edu successfully and on its discontinuation had to repeat this for 365 where they encountered complexities and personal storage allocation problems. Coupled with this the staff did not like 365. They have resorted to a system where students use their home email or Google Mail account.
Xaverian used IAM Cloud (an Office 365 transition facilitator) to host mirrored AD authentication based on Microsoft Azure server technologies on Microsoft’s European Servers.
The Google Mail implementations at Grimsby and North East Worcestershire have proceeded smoothly.
Reaseheath have also implemented SkyDrive.
Delivery Models
Accrington and Rossendale College: This is a collaborative College model using a single cloud Application for 4 Colleges.
East Riding College: Email in the cloud. Office 365.
Exeter College: Data centre in the cloud, including email and storage.
Grimsby Institute: Google Mail.
Hartlepool College: Microsoft Office 365.
Highbury College: Collaborative working with Eduserve to progressively migrate College IT provision to the cloud, including email and storage.
50 The following diagram shows the high level architecture approach offered by Eduserve.
Northampton College: Planned to move email and storage in the cloud and subsequently they set up their normal students to be mail-enabled forwarding mail to students’ home email accounts.
North East Worcestershire College: Working with a consultancy to implement single sign on to email and a wide range of applications.
Reaseheath College: 365 email and SharePoint.
Xaverian College: 365 email in the cloud.
Supplier Relationships
Accrington and Rossendale College: Microsoft 365. There was an initial unavailability of Microsoft 365 tenancies but this is now resolved.
East Riding College:
“The implementation of Office365 has been a lot more complex than originally anticipated and the functionality of the system has not fully met our expectations. Whilst our consultants and Microsoft have provided a great deal of assistance, the ‘look and feel’ of Office365 does not, in its present state, present end users with an experience that matches that of the Microsoft SkyDrive offering.
51
There are upgrades planned by Microsoft which we will explore; however, the inability to support Microsoft FIM in Office365 has caused us to rethink our strategy on the deployment of this service. It is clear that the College can offer their users greater flexibility with cloud-based technologies but most of these are delivered by College ICT services rather than externally hosted clouds. The Microsoft SkyDrive offering is the most suitable for staff and students wishing to use web-based apps and off-site cloud storage. However, remote email and FIM capability is best serviced through the College OWA portals and an internet-based gateway into the FIM portal hosted on College servers.”
Exeter College: Immediately prior to implementation and testing it became apparent that there was a lack of clarity of understanding between the technical team at the College and that of the SaaS/hosting partner.
In order to limit the risk to other College activities, resource was redirected during the summer. On 25 September a meeting took place between the College and suppliers at which a means of resolving the outstanding issues was agreed. There is now a revised implementation date of 15 November.
Hartlepool College: Phoenix Software was engaged as the IT partner for 365 implementation. Highbury College: Eduserve.
North East Worcestershire College: The College found it necessary to make a change of IT partner and used the JISC communities to advise on this.
Google Vault for back-ups was not ready for UK Education and was not priced but the College found an alternative.
Reaseheath College:
“Licensing from Microsoft took at least two weeks to come through once our campus agreement was renewed. We hit a stopping point when we tried to get the licences for Office 365. Microsoft refused to issue the licences even though they are free as we had less than 30 days on our campus agreement. Our campus agreement has now been renewed including the Office 365 licences and we are just awaiting a code from Microsoft so that we can integrate the mail system with the cloud and move the student account across.”
Project and Change Management
Accrington and Rossendale College:
“Migration takes several days so we couldn’t live in term time.”
East Riding College:
“We have completed the implementation of Office365, Exchange, SharePoint and Lync; however, it has emerged that Forefront Identity Manager is no longer supported under Office365, only Live@Edu is. We have therefore deployed FIM as an ‘on-premises’ solution delivered within our own cloud environment to external users.
It has also emerged that Office365 in its present format does not provide satisfactory cloud-based
52
application and storage solution to our users, the SharePoint based platform is too complex and there is some management overhead involved in its set-up. In discussions with our consultants and Microsoft it has been determined that the functionality of Office365 will be improved when the platform is upgraded to SharePoint 2013 next year. We will continue to operate the Office365 gateway and await developments from this upgrade.”
Exeter College: The following have been achieved: identification of functional requirements, estimation of storage and performance needs leading to the production of a requirements specification. This project has been aligned with the VLE project which has meant that there are some decisions, relating to potential hosting partners and cloud service products, which need careful consideration to ensure that maximum benefit is derived for the user experience. Partners have been selected and specifications agreed. The production service has been created in the cloud but is not yet fully functional; this is due to security concerns surrounding the strategy for integration with the College’s Active Directory.
Grimsby Institute: The approach was piloted in College learning centres.
Hartlepool College: The migration process initially went well. After the migration was completed it was discovered that there was an issues at Microsoft data centre which had affected a number of other migrations from Live@Edu which delayed the completion and training for four weeks until Microsoft resolved the issue. Due to the delay with Microsoft this caused some issues with staff and contractors’ availability to finish the project and complete the training. The new system was publicised to students using Blackboard and the College displays.
Northampton College: There was a need for an increase in bandwidth which was supplied by JANET. It took considerable time for this to be implemented. New firewalls were also purchased from BTiNET and were configured to accommodate the increased bandwith.
Live@Edu was set up and tested and worked well. It provided 10GB of mail and access to 25GB of storage and access to Microsoft Office applications online. On the discontinuation of Live@Edu by Microsoft, the College set up Office 365. This involved a good deal of technical time and liaison with Microsoft including five new authentication servers. Storage quotas were reduced by Microsoft to 500MB of SharePoint storage instead of the previous 25GB.
The service was rolled out to any students who wanted to use the Office email without the storage and a limited number took up the offer.
North East Worcestershire:
“Staff buy-in - moving all users away from a system they are used to -presents many challenges which is why we are working in a staggered roll-out with buy-in from senior managers and College leaders. Never under estimate the amount of support and training that is needed within a large organisation to move to new ways of working. With a small ILT team there were issues around providing the support needed and timescales to complete supporting documentation.
The one fundamental lesson learnt is to introduce new systems slowly; the initial training given to senior managers covered all features of Google Apps and on reflection proved to be overwhelming. The step was then taken to focus training on specific apps within the suite and deliver training and resources based around these.
This has led us to deliver training over a much longer period of time than was original planned
53 for but these costs for training were always planned once the initial resources were created as part of the project. The training for using Google Apps is now delivered alongside training to support the College VLE as the two go hand in hand.”
Xaverian College: The College initially planned to implement the Live@Edu infrastructure and with a transition to Office 365. A network failure to the College’s staff and back-office servers meant that Live@Edu reached the end of its life before provision could be moved to Office 365. In November 2012 the College was approached to submit a zero cost (funded) application to Microsoft to allow for the IAM cloud (an Office 365 transition facilitator) to host mirrored AD authentication based on Microsoft Azure server technologies on Microsoft’s European servers. The College agreed to enter into a delivery contract with the IAM cloud.
Impact
East Riding College: SharePoint online and Lync setup.
“We have also carried out a significant amount of work in open workshops with staff to test the functionality of these elements of Office365. We have found that end users are much more comfortable with the Microsoft SkyDrive solution than Office 365 and that there are still some issues with the Lync client working properly on Android devices.
We are continuing our investigations into the Lync client problems as we intend to roll out an ‘on-premises’ Lync solution for VOIP by March 2013.
In summary, we have a functioning Office 365 platform but it does not yet meet the requirements of our user base. We are awaiting the upgrade of the platform to SharePoint 2013 in January at which point we will again evaluate the functionality of Office365. In the meantime we are recommending to users the Microsoft SkyDrive Cloud solution which provides access to web apps, 7GB storage and collaboration capabilities.”
Grimsby Institute:
“The adoption of Google Mail and Google Apps has gone really well. We are currently averaging around 350 unique users of the system daily. Although we have only activated this for students at present we already have staff looking at the features and requesting access.”
Hartlepool College:
“This cloud-based email project will significantly improve staff and student productivity by reducing time required to manage emails, allowing better access to resources anytime and anywhere and improve student/staff collaboration. The new system will also significantly reduce internal storage, improve resilience and system performance. There is an initial indication of an increase of student usage of email through the new system.”
Highbury College:
“It is hoped that by using a cloud service that there will be an improved quality of service as result of this change. This is because extra resilience and back--up has been added into the Highbury infrastructure using the cloud infrastructure.
54 Northampton College: A staff and student survey was undertaken with less than 10% liking the 365 email system. Students preferred their own personal email accounts and the storage facilities of Google Drive or SkyDrive. Office 365 was therefore discontinued, with College mail now forwarded to their home email accounts and assistance given with setting up a Google Mail or Outlook account if necessary.
North East Worcestershire College: By utilising cloud-based applications North East Worcestershire College have enabled collaborative technologies and mobile working options to help support the work of all staff and students. The funding from the AoC has allowed the College to dedicate time and resources to supporting staff and students to use these technologies and explore avenues for reducing costs by working with partners to develop our cloud-based systems.
Reaseheath College: Access has been achieved to email and calendar from onsite and offsite seamlessly. Access to office web apps and SkyDrive has also been achieved. The existing SharePoint intranet was migrated to the cloud-hosted version ready for September 2013. All students have Outlook accounts that can be accessed from anywhere. They have access to SharePoint pages and to SkyDrive. The staff intranet (SharePoint) will be moved to the cloud-hosted site and the two physical servers retired.
Xaverian College: Mail is now managed by a third party with guaranteed 99.9% up time, something that the College would never have been able to guarantee. Together with additional functionality in including calendars and shared contacts, the College is now in a position to share information internally in a much more efficient manner. The ease with which the Office 365 system can be added to users’ own devices (including tablets and other mobile devices) has borne immediate fruit with College managers of all levels receiving information on the go and not having to log on to a work station to identify issues to be dealt with.
The College has been trialling the new mail system with members of the College council with a very welcoming response. Students see this change of mail provision as a very positive move. In Autumn 2013 the College launched its new Intranet system embedding mail for the very first time. This step change for the College will see students receiving email information directly within the learning platform they access every day at College.
55 Savings
Accrington and Rossendale College: £52,000 savings per College over four years.
East Riding College:
“We will not be able to determine these until we have fully deployed the ‘on-premises’ Lync solution which has been delayed due to the fact that we will also be migrating our existing PSTN services to VOIP using a full Lync deployment scenario. The Lync solution within Office 365 does not yet give us the functionality to support the Virtual Classroom on this platform.”
Exeter College:
“Expected savings are reduced expenditure on email and file servers, associated storage and back-up capacity, reduced cost of implementation, reduced requirement for the re‐engineering of College data centres in order to accommodate required increase in capacity, reduced energy consumption and consequent reduction in machine‐room cooling costs.”
The College anticipates being able to evaluate these savings by end of 2013.
Hartlepool College: The following savings have been identified:
The cancellation of the current spam filter subscription per year - £4,000
Saving of exchange licences per year - £500
Cost saving for not replacing physical email server - £8000 over 3 years
Highbury College: The College anticipates substantial savings during the project which are illustrated in the table below (estimated). As part of the project a true cost-saving analysis will be carried out and disseminated to the sector.
Description Saving -estimated (per annum) Capital Expenditure £55,000
Power/ UPS (Running Service) £6,500
Cooling (Running & Service) £3,500
Staff £5,000
Total £70,000
By undergoing this project the College will not be updating its secondary back-up data centre this summer and as such will using the Eduserve cloud instead. This has meant that the College will not need to update its Storage Area Network (SAN) and Blade servers at this site. In addition to this there is a lower staffing resource for the IT team to manage this site therefore increasing the savings that are being made. A number of College services are running from the cloud service which has shown the same level of uptime as previously provided by the College but at a reduced cost.
56 North East Worcestershire: Savings have been achieved in ILT staff time re user names and passwords.
“The exchange and intranet platforms were hosted on two separate Power Edge servers that cost an estimated £ 480 per year to run. By removing these two servers from our back-up routine (as the information is now backed up in the cloud) we again made savings on our DR maintenance agreements and although hard to quantify we strongly feel that there will be a reduction in the amount of maintenance needed to be completed by our in-house IT team. There is also a saving made by removing our reliance on our current library authentication software of around £3,000 per annum.”
Reaseheath College: There are cost savings on maintenance of servers of approximately £1500 per server with a total of £7500. There will be no renewal costs for the servers when they are due for replacement (average cost £4000 each). Additionally there is a reduction in power consumption by 237w per server, which also means less Ups requirements.
Xaverian College: Prior to moving email to the cloud, a single specialist member of the network team supported the email system. With the move to Office 365, the management of email is now distributed across the team with most of the technical management being performed by a third party. Staff savings are estimated at £8000 per year with further savings on the termination of the previous Novel Licensing contract.
Sustainability and Expected Longer Term Impact
Accrington and Rossendale College: The College has achieved an energy saving solution which is scalable in terms of numbers of accounts and future storage requirements.
Grimsby Institute: There is lower energy consumption through thin clients.
Highbury, North East Worcestershire, Reaseheath and Xaverian Colleges all anticipate energy savings.
Replicablity for the Wider FE Sector
Accrington and Rossendale College: This solution is replicable in single Colleges and across a group of Colleges. The College will make a case study available and is willing to make documents such as tender documents available.
East Riding College: For institutions not already hosting their own web-based Exchange, SharePoint, Lync and FIM services, Office365 offers a workable, if slightly complex, solution.
Hartlepool College: The approach is replicable in Colleges wishing to migrate to Microsoft Office 365 and will be demonstrated, through JISC RSC Northern, to other Colleges in the region who have expressed an interest or are planning to migrate to 365.
Highbury College: This approach is intended to be replicable through Eduserve supporting other Colleges based on the experience with Highbury.
North East Worcestershire: All resources created have been designed with sharing and modification in mind. All leaflets whilst sent as PDFs to staff have been created in Publisher allowing easy modification. Interactive presentations have been created using Xerte with the RLO
57 models to be made available again for easy modification.
The project is being discussed and shared via the West Midlands JISC E Learning Conference in May 2013 and all resources will be made available via a specially constructed Google site with this being shared again through the JISC portal.
Xaverian College: The College is committed to working in partnership with other local providers. As part of MANCEP (Manchester Catholic Education Partnership) the College is actively engaged in bringing academic and operational teams together to share experiences and good practice. It is through this ‘collegiate’ approach that the College intends to demonstrate both the financial and operational benefits that can be gained through moving towards cloud-based service provision.
58 Conclusion
This report has captured an emerging and impressive body of knowledge and experience drawn from a wide variety of Colleges. It is, however, incomplete in the sense that several projects are still in progress. There is scope for further research which might include:
Measuring medium term impact
Reviewing and quantifying savings over a period
Forensic studies of the costs of IT in Colleges
Deeper comparisons of approaches e.g. the relative advantages of Google Apps and Google Mail and Microsoft Office 365 and key challenges to consider when introducing them.
What the report has demonstrated is that, ‘As with every other computing trend, the skill lies in harnessing the technology in an appropriate, safe, rational and timely manner, and everyone’s journey will necessarily reflect a bespoke mix of factors’1. The broad range of projects described in the report illustrates the many ways in which cloud technologies might be adopted by Colleges to meet the specific requirements of the organisation. It is, however, possible to make generalisations about what Colleges ought to consider prior to adopting any given cloud service. Senior managers in Colleges should consider the following:
Understand the College’s business processes
Assess which elements of the College’s IT services might be outsourced
Choose the right cloud services provider for the College
Work out how best to access to the cloud
Provision services flexibly
Determine the full range services delivered from the cloud and work out the most appropriate for the College
Use cloud services as an extension to the IT department
Ensure that the cloud solutions fit the core business and not the other way around.
These principles argue for the view that the College’s IT services should no longer be viewed as a cost centre but as a business delivery unit relevant to the whole College strategy for the provision of outstanding services to students, teachers and managers.
The report has shown that, while technical challenges remain, associated issues of effective project management, sustainable funding and the ability of even large suppliers to meet the needs of Colleges are perhaps as important in delivering a successful projects. In other words, ‘The c ulture required to shift to embrace the use of commodity services will require a significant change in the way people work across the ICT functions of [Colleges]. Should this not be addressed it will impede successful uptake of the… cloud principles and approach.’2
1 Fenn, J. & Raskino, M., Mastering the Hype Cycle: How to choose the right innovation at the right time, (Harvard Business Press, 2008, p.7) 2 Government Cloud Strategy: A sub strategy of the Government ICT Strategy (Crown copyright, March 2011, p.20) 59 AoC will continue to work with Colleges to assist them in the implementation of cloud technologies and to lobby government and suppliers to ensure that appropriate and relevant services are offered in the ways best suited to their needs.
To view data, compiled by JANET, on current and predicted use of bandwidth data, please visit the AoC Cloud computing website www.aoc.co.uk/cloud_computing/Cloud_computing_report
60 With thanks to all project partners who contributed to the development of this report and consultant Chris West
The Association of Colleges 2013 2-5 Stedham Place, London, WC1A 1HU Tel: 020 7034 9900 Fax: 020 7034 9955 Email: [email protected] website: www.aoc.co.uk