Open University students will have greater opportunities to collaborate and communicate with each other thanks to a new agreement between the OU and Google.
The University will be deploying Google Apps for Education to run alongside other learning systems, with services that include: email, instant messaging, contact management, calendar, space for shared documents, and online document creation. There is the potential for more services to be added in the future.
These additional services are being provided to students to enable them to network and collaborate more effectively with each other. The default email provision for students will be with Google, but existing preferred email options will be maintained.
Google Apps will provide students with an area in which to store and share documents. They will also be able to create content without having to have an office application residing on their desktop – all carried out using a web browser on a range of platforms and devices.
The agreement follows the phasing out of FirstClass, which currently hosts OU students’ emails as well as discussion fora. As FirstClass is replaced, students will be offered their own Gmail accounts with addresses ending in @my.open.ac.uk.
The agreement between the OU and Google should ensure high levels of service provision, with the apps hosted by Google, managed by the University and accessed by the student with a web browser. Students’ data will be hosted under European Data Protection and US Safe Harbor legislation.
More information about the schedule for the introduction of the services, due in the coming months, will be available soon.
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