Education, Meet Cloud

I was fortunate enough to be invited to the Campfire One event at Google last week, where a few new App Engine features were previewed.

Some of the new features, like scheduled tasks, are nice additions, but not game changing in any way. As useful and necessary as scheduled tasks are for things like push notifications, it’s not like we couldn’t use third-party cron job schedulers to hit a URL every few minutes.

But two of the new features promise some truly game-changing potential for the App Engine platform. One of these features is Java runtime support. The other feature - the one I’m personally more interested in - is the new support for accessing firewalled data through Secure Data Connectors. At the event, Oracle showed a demo of how confidential CRM data could be embedded into a iGoogle-style environment residing in the cloud. And as Kevin Gibbs and the Oracle and IBM speakers implied, SDC is mostly focused on typical business use-cases such as CRM.

But SDC support could also be a lifesaver for educational institutions.

Beyond the Firewall

Anyone who has ever worked for IT at a school knows about FERPA and other regulations safeguarding confidential student data. Such regulation typically results in an assumption that course management, e-mail, and various other apps must be run from an onsite server and stored behind a firewall. And don’t even think about exporting or sharing data. With the massive expenses and hassles of even the most basic onsite solutions, students and faculty should not be holding their breath for anything but the bare essentials.

Or should they? When I was in my third year at Northwestern, our ASG president at the time won the popular student vote at least in part because of a promise to “start using Gmail”. And surely enough, it wasn’t long before the school signed up for Google Apps Education Edition and students were able to access their school e-mail through a familiar, cloud-based interface with at least the same amount of security as the expensive and unfamiliar onsite alternative.

How App Engine Developers Fit In

Northwestern wasn’t alone in this transition. There are now millions of individuals and thousands of institutions using Google Apps Education Edition, and there are more converts with each passing day.

However, there is plenty of data that wouldn’t be a fit for Gmail or Google Docs or Google Sites. For instance, Google does not have an equivalent software for course management or course selection. But this is where App Engine and Secure Data Connectors come in.

It’s not difficult to imagine an iGoogle-style modular environment for students and faculty where all school-related data could be securely accessed, and possibly all for free, thanks to the efforts of App Engine developers.

I’m fairly certain we’ll see some experiments in this space very soon, and these developments will pave the way for a new level of standardization and persistence of educational data that will help bring educational software into the 21st century. We’ll wonder how we ever managed without it.