Students to receive unlimited storage for Google Drive
Google announced Sept. 30 that they will be providing students with unlimited Google Drive storage for files and documents and will also supply enhanced administrative controls to the Google Apps. This proves a highly useful platform, education-wise.
Rutgers gives all student access to ScarletApps, an email and calendar solution that uses Google’s Apps for educational programs. The service gives students an individual email account that includes a Rutgers-specific version of popular Google apps like Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar and Google Talk.
As of now, the Google Drive application provides all students a hearty 30 gigabytes of storage. In comparison, the Microsoft OneDrive account contains with 15 GB, and the Dropbox on the Sakai site only starts with 2 GB.
Unlimited storage will soon begin rolling out to schools that use Google’s Apps for education programs, including Rutgers, according to a Google blog post.
Students will not have to pay for the storage increase. The new initiative includes unlimited storage that allows for the uploading of individual files up to a colossal five terabytes. That’s more than 5,000 GB for one file.
Google Apps Vault will also become available to people using it for educational purposes. The Vault provides search features and file auditing, which tracks updates and activity on files.
According to a Google blog post, the new initiative will be made available in “the coming weeks.”
Google made sure to tout the strength of their file encryption in their post, reminding readers that “every file uploaded to Google Drive is encrypted, not only from your device to Google and in transit between Google data centers, but also at rest on Google servers.
“As always, the data that schools and students put into our systems is theirs,” the post reads.
Projects like this are increasingly important as technology improves at an ever-accelerating rate. Many classes at Rutgers have begun using virtual methods instead of paper, and Google Drive has become a popular tool for students to collaborate on assignments regardless of their location.
The School of Communication and Information, for instance, offers hybrid courses where students participate on eCollege or Sakai. In one writer’s section of “Introduction to Organizational Management and Information Systems,” the professor actually made a Google Drive folder so the entire class could collaborate.
Google’s options so far seem to be working much better than the Rutgers-built Sakai and eCollege, which are inconsistent at best.
As Rutgers fully replaces its own email-platforms like Eden with packaged software provided by companies like Google, they should also consider replacing eCollege and Sakai with packaged solutions.
