Abstract
The future of education lays in the hand of Cloud Computing given the benefits of learning delivery, costs reduction, and innovation. At the same time, the threat of cyber-attacks and security breaches are also mounting for education based organizations and are a prime target given the amount and type of personal information available. This manuscript discusses the cloud security, privacy, and ethical mechanisms required from a teacher, student, and administrator perspective.
TopIntroduction
The future of education lays in the hand of Cloud Computing, with easy to configure hardware and software components. Utilizing Cloud Computing to their advantage, teachers, administrators, and students are able to deliver content and learn much more effectively within an integrated environment. Given the ability to access anytime anywhere, this enables teachers, administrators and students to target individual needs of students and customize educational delivery. Instead of maintaining all systems separately at each institution and in order to eliminate infrastructure that is dated by 10-20 years at most institutions, Cloud Computing offers the flexibility to delivery current learning technology for the 21st century.
In an effort to reduce costs, increase efficiency and availability, increase enrollment, and innovate with technology many educational institutions are moving to a Cloud Computing model. At the same time, the threat of cyber-attacks and security breaches are also mounting for education based organizations and are a prime target given the amount and type of personal information available. In recent example cases, financial and legal costs are estimated in the millions of dollars with several hundred thousand student and personnel records compromised. In another instance at a state university, some 30,000 student’s social security numbers were compromised. It is estimated that many data breaches in education go undetected more than in other industries, and the impact is often realized in the forms of enrollments and endowments.
Learning Objectives
This chapter includes the cloud security, privacy, and ethical mechanisms required from a teacher, student, and administrator perspective. For cloud security, the paper outlines the access strategies, service-oriented architectures, and implementation components required to successfully utilize cloud computing in education. For privacy and ethical considerations, several federal laws have been passed to develop a minimum standard for protection of records, and must be developed with flexibility of changing technology and regulations, along with established techniques for privacy preservation.
Cloud Computing
Cloud computing enables convenient on demand access to an elastic set of shared computing resources. Generally cloud computing is broken into 3 categories of software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (Paas). SaaS is anticipated to grow the fastest and is typically what users see and interact with directly. The cloud computing market is anticipated to be nearly $200 Billion in 2020 according to Forrester, up from $58 Billion in 2013 (Seeking Alpha, 2015).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Security: A set of processes and techniques for ensuring appropriate access by individuals or systems in an effort to prevent harm.
Privacy: The ability to have personal information used appropriately and without ongoing observation.
Education: The process of receiving or providing instruction and learning.
Cloud Computing: Enables convenient on demand access to an elastic set of shared computing resources.
Ethics: A set of moral policies that governs behavior.
Classroom: A physical or virtual room where student education occurs.
Legal: A set of law policies that governs behavior.