Approaching 'Clouds' @ Academic Technology

Being working with faculty on the 'clouds,' the challenges of adopting a cloud solution have been the quality of service (including Accessibility and Stability), rapid change of new technologies (or ideas), as well as the long term Availability (cloud comes and goes). Often, faculty run across an application in the cloud and would like to adopt it for the online class use, but, in a few weeks, they realize a more sound solution is there and soon notice that to move the content across clouds is not an easy option since the most cloud services make it easy to be in, but NOT designed to get off. I always make the joke of jumping between clouds is more dangerous than jumping ships since the chance is much smaller to survive (falling from the sky)! Also most 'Freely available' cloud application services are designed to be 'Open for Public' access since 'Hits' is how they generate revenues. No control of content distribution and the quality of commercial advertisements are other concerns from time to time. For instance, it is always a popular question from faculty on how to restrict my content on YouTube only to only my students. This has not been an easy task since not all cloud applications provide built-in options for access integration (ps. we do have success on integrate iTunes U with access control and the Centennial Digital project with Flickr). There is also another TBD subject of the content ownership and IP! Also, the 'beauty' of cloud solutions is widely available choices. Faculty can easily find a desired solution that meets the pedagogical design, but just not everyone has the same idea. For instance, one faculty prefers YouTube since students can contribute in captioning while another likes LiveStream for class lecture podcasting. There is not a prefect solution for every faculty and it seems defeating the advantage of adopting cloud application services by narrow down the choices of cloud applications.

It has been my on-going effort to establish a solid academic application infrastructure and a well designed online teaching and learning environment (cored with the LMS) to support cloud technology -- that I refer it to open up the Sky for clouds! Content Matters!! An Academic Content Environment was proposed to allow faculty and students to store, publish, and share the learning content objects and provide the technology assistance of providing the content objects. The first step starts with our campus streaming infrastructure to establish user video repositories with initial focus of helping users producing video content. By adopting the industrial standard video format to ensure the re-usability of content on different platforms and, hopefully, in a decade later. Users can publish their content from the video repository directly to LMS for restricted class access or can upload the videos to iTunes U, YouTube, or uStream by taking advantage of Cloud and Social applications. Keep it simple! The system provides the essential functions of content management, the content storage, and capabilities of integration (ie. Web Services); so, users can scale out their classroom lectures thru the clouds worry-free! The next step is to extend the video repository to Academic Content Environment, ACE, for digital materials distribution and extending the system the ePortfolio and Learning Outcome assessments for students as the foundation of Life long learning!

Max