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Education IT

Student & faculty demand top driver for university IT

By Kelly Ng | 30 January 2012

The new digital generation demands mobility and a seamless learning experience - from the classroom, to the library, and everywhere else on campus.

Fifteen CIOs of Singapore’s leading higher education institutions gathered over breakfast at St Regis Hotel to discuss fresh approaches to campus modernisation. The attendees focused their discussions on the opportunities and benefits of virtualisation and cloud computing technologies for education institutions.

Joining the party was Victoria University Australia to share two recent virtualisation deployments. “We rolled out virtualised desktops which allowed application access anywhere and enhanced collaboration,” said Pro Vice-Chancellor and CIO Professor Peter Creamer. “We also virtualised our servers which resulted in capital savings of A$1.8 million (US$1.9 million).” Victoria University has over 53,000 students and 2607 staff across 11 campuses.

A majority of the CIOs believed mobile-based technologies will have the biggest impact on the future of learning and teaching, and all are looking at virtualisation or cloud implementations.

“Transform IT into an on-demand service should give higher education institutions centralised simplicity, security, complete visibility, optimised delivery and mobility,” said Yaj Malik, Area Vice President ASEAN, Citrix Systems.

While there is cost pressure to deliver more with less, 60 per cent of the attendees identified increasing students’ and faculty’s demand as the top driver for IT initiatives in their institutions. They expected the growth of smart phone use on campus to be highest, followed by tablets and laptops.

“The concept of virtualisation enables access anytime and anywhere to information such as course materials, your personal work and desktop, and supports the notion of seamless learning. There will be challenges in terms of implementation, costs, software license issues, getting the early adopters going, and more,” said Professor Chee Kit Looi, Head, Centre of Excellence for Learning Innovation, National Institute of Education, Singapore.

The breakfast meeting was convened jointly by FutureGov Asia Pacific and Citrix Systems.

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