Brown University creates a united community of independent thinkers with Google for Education tools Background

Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island is the seventh-oldest institution of higher learning in the U.S. In its 250 years, Brown has built a community defined by a “spirit of free inquiry” that attracts independent thinkers from around the world. The university is known for an open curriculum that encourages students to tailor their education to fit their needs and build custom degrees based on individual interests. What they wanted to do

• Provide all students, faculty, staff, and alumni with a modern email system offering ample storage • Introduce collaborative tools that would work across the university ecosystem, without added cost

Challenge

Brown faced the challenge of finding collaborative tools that would unite its students, faculty and staff, while inspiring out-of-the-box thinking. The move to Google began with Brown’s 6,000 undergraduate students, who transitioned to Google Apps in fall 2009. Students, familiar with Google, took readily to using Apps in their academic lives. But as of 2010, nearly 4,000 faculty and staff were still using Microsoft Exchange.

What they did

The inadequate email storage quota of just 200MB per user meant faculty and staff constantly had to clean out their inboxes and delete large attachments to stay under their email limit. And the university needed an expensive on-premise email server upgrade.

What they accomplished

Brown wanted a cost-effective, yet secure and easy-to-use suite of tools that would keep university research safe while encouraging open communication and collaboration between all members of the university.

• Provided Google Apps for Education for easy and effective email, storage, and collaboration tools

• Moved 20,000 accounts from Exchange to Google • Stored more than three million files in Google Drive • Realized $800,000 per year in savings

Solution

An assessment team overwhelmingly recommended Google Apps for its large storage capacity, steady feature updates, and major savings: an estimated $800,000 per year over five years and millions in server upgrade costs. More importantly, Google Apps for Education could unite the entire Brown community with a common set of tools. The University Counsel and Chief Security Officer approved the move to Google after learning that they’d receive the same level of security protection as businesses receive when they pay for Google Apps for Work. The migration process began with early adopters but by fall 2010, all of the university’s 20,000 Exchange accounts had been converted to Google accounts.

Benefits Collaboration for classes Using Google Groups, instructors can email all group members at once and share work among instructors, teaching assistants, students, and even nonBrown account users. Instructors can assign and manage permissions to Google Docs, share access to Google Sites, and easily coordinate Calendar events and Hangouts. Faculty also use Google Docs and Forms to collect feedback, review student work, and facilitate peer reviews.

“I love Google Apps for Education. From sharing calendars and creating appointment slots, to using Google Apps Scripts to share departmental metrics, we use Google and the Apps extensively on a daily basis. I can’t remember what collaborating with teams was like before Google.” —Hong Chau, instructional designer

Collaboration for student groups Students also use Google Apps to run their extracurricular organizations. Brown Market Shares, a student-run food distribution program, uses Drive to store and share important documents, such as meeting agendas, sign-up forms and customer check-in Sheets. “As students with such busy schedules, we only meet together as an entire team for two hours every week,” says Meagan Miller, Brown undergraduate student and Brown Market Shares’ communications coordinator. “Using a Google Doc for our weekly meeting agendas, for example, is useful because we can each add items to it before the meeting at any time of the day or night.” Moving to the cloud has changed the game for students. They no longer need to carry their laptops around; they can choose any device on campus or pull out their mobile phone and immediately be productive. Files are stored in a more secure place than a hard drive and are no longer under the threat of accidental water spills. Since the switch to Google, Brown students have uploaded over three million files to Drive, including hundreds of thousands of non-Google files in various formats. Stronger alumni ties Five years ago, students requested lifetime email. Google Apps has now made that a reality. After students graduate, they can take their email, calendars and files with them for life. Smoother IT operations Geoffrey Greene, director of IT support, says that the cloud-based nature of Google Apps has helped his department operate more smoothly. The IT department uses Google Sheets to populate a spreadsheet with scripts that send service outage notifications automatically and allow the team to troubleshoot internally and quickly communicate the problem to external stakeholders. “All you need is a web browser,” Greene says. “It doesn’t matter if you’re on your PC at home or on your Chromebook at work; you can do anything from any machine, anywhere.”

“All you need is a web browser. It doesn’t matter if you’re on your PC at home or on your Chromebook at work; you can do anything from any machine, anywhere.” —Geoffrey Greene, director, IT support

© 2014 Google Inc. All rights reserved. Google and the Google logo are trademarks of Google Inc. All other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated. 141203

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