New Educational ICT Environment with Cloud in Kyushu University

Abstract

We reported the status of the educational ICT (Information and Communication Technology) environment in Kyushu University in SIGUCCS 2009. At that time, we provided the host computer and many iMacs as terminals for students. We have been using BYOD in our university since April 2013 as we reported in SIGUCCS 2013. At last, we almost completed the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) project in Kyushu UniversityAs our next step, we are going to move all servers such as Moodle, Mahara, application server, LDAP, and AD (Active Directory) from on the premises to the cloud. The cloud provides many advantages for us, namely physical space, power, budget, performance, and so on. It is now desirable for us to use cloud aggressively. However, many important people remain concerned about potential security issues. We have provided detailed measures against the problems in order to persuade the old guard.In addition, it is important for us to provide a common ICT environment for students including Windows PCs and Macs. We are planning to introduce the VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) interface to make every student use a common Windows environment in classes without any limit in September 2017. Students can also use a Linux instance if they require it. For that purpose, we are going to develop the budget management system to control the usage of individual students under the specified budget level.We are realizing the next generation educational ICT environment under BYOD with AWS cloud. It should be the model case for new higher education in the world.