“The price tag is expensive. However, it’s much less than buying server, server, server, server,” Thirsk said. “The return on that asset is considerably higher than doing one server at a time, one switch at a time.”
iLearn
Marist College developed its own version of the open-source education platform Sakai, which it calls iLearn. Through its cloud, Marist runs iLearn internally and distributes it to partner organizations.
“We started to see that, very much so, we were offering Software as a Service through our instructional technology,” Thirsk said. “We developed it so not only could a student sign up and take courses online, but we could also host [the software] for other [organizations], where we simply create them an instance and provide them access to our mainframe.”
Marist College often helps other schools and colleges teach courses online, do online collaboration, and set up virtualization. “We are very much a hub,” Thirsk said.
Transparency
Like all clouds, the technology behind Marist’s interface is transparent. Students at Marist College don’t think to themselves, “I’m logging into a cloud” when they use their secure login.
Anything students or faculty would do on a traditional computer, they can do online through the cloud, and usually with much greater convenience, at any time of the day, Thirsk said.
They can register, take a course, look up grades, pay bills, search the library catalog, collaborate online for team projects, go back and forth in asynchronous conversation, post documents and presentations, and access social-networking sites like Facebook.
“They are not [aware] that they are on a cloud, or a cloud configuration,” Thirsk said. “They are [aware] that they log in with their login, and there, through our portal, is everything they are allowed to access.”
Marist College has some low-cost, thin-client devices from DevonIT Inc. installed in its student services office and some research labs. These next-generation thin-client devices don’t have a hard drive; the processing power and software is delivered from the mainframe.
“The user doesn’t know [he’s] not using the desktop. It looks like Windows, it behaves like Windows, but there are no data stored there,” Thirsk said. “It [requires] very, very low power usage, but you get all the functionality, network connectivity, bandwidth, and everything you get from a very large computer. And, they are cheap.”
Extra security
Cloud computing offers an extra layer of security, Thirsk said, because data are not stored on local machines. If someone steals a laptop or computer, the thief will not get any data.
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