The Future of Education

Cloud computing is one of the hottest education trends. The emergence of the networked information economy is unleashing two powerful forces on education:

1) easy access to high-speed networks is empowering individuals to access and use ICT globally.

2) it is making possible to leverage education through scale economies in unprecedented ways.

So Cloud computing represents a fundamental change in the way computing power is generated and distributed, transforms the delivery of ICT tools and products into elastic, on demand services.

Many schools and educational organisations are considering migrating their activities to the Cloud, and this for a variety of reasons: lowers computer costs, higher accessibility, improved performance, cheaper software, storage capacity ...

Cloud-based developments offer a new dynamic way to educate that aligns with the way we think, share, learn and collaborate outside of the classroom. It offers an opportunity to transform the role of educators and pedagogy with services tailored to teachers’ needs in individual classrooms.

To explore the potential of the Cloud in education, the network  ‘School on Cloud’ (SoC) has been created, consisting of 57 partners from 18 European countries.

SoC will address two key questions:

- how should education respond and

- what is the impact on education stakeholders and teachers and what will it be in the future?

This will be investigated in 4 different work groups

1. Transition from ground to Cloud: sharing experiences of issues related to leadership and management in different educational contexts. These can be technological, social, economic, cultural and pedagogical. They may necessitate training and development, guidance and advice.
2.  i-Teacher: role of the teacher: looking at learning and teaching issues connected with Cloud-based learning. It examines the barriers and key competences required. It explores teachers as innovators. iTeacher reviews learning and teaching approaches and provides practical and essential guidance for teachers and teacher educators.
3. Integrating the Cloud: exploring the opportunities and issues that access to learning afforded by the Cloud in personalising learning experiences 'at any time, any place by any one'. This concerns teachers and educators, schools, colleges and adult education providers and involves understanding the possibility to exploit the opportunities resulting from both formal and informal learning situations.
4. Future prospects: dealing with topics like the impact of open (education) resources, the availability of free and available information, new generation tools for the Cloud, communicating and publishing on the Cloud and the resultant issues such as ethics and IPR. It will target organisations such as teacher associations, NGOs, publishing organisations, museums, libraries, researchers, Ministries and policy makers.