In my old age, at 33, I decided to go to a master's program in computer science. I graduated from my first high school back in 2008 and not at all in the IT field, a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then. Like any other student, also with Slavic roots, I became curious: what can I get for free (mainly in terms of additional knowledge in my specialty)? And, since my past and present closely intersect with the hosting industry, the main choice fell on the giants providing cloud services.
In my short cycle, I will talk about what educational opportunities the three leaders in the cloud services market offer to students, teachers and educational institutions (both universities and schools), as well as how our university uses some of them. And I'll start with Google.
Immediately after the habrakat, I will disappoint you a little. Residents of the CIS countries are not very lucky. Some of the delicious Google For Education goodies are not available there. Therefore, I will talk about them at the end, especially for those who study at universities in Europe, North America and some other countries. Some of them are available in a truncated form, however. So let's go.
G Suite for Education
Many of us love Gmail, Google Drive and the hedgehogs. Particularly lucky even managed to capture free mail accounts for their domains, now known as G Suite legacy free edition, which is gradually tightening the screws. If anyone does not know, G Suite for Education is all the same, and even more.
Any school and any university can get 10000 licenses (and, accordingly, accounts) for mail, disk, calendar and other collaboration features offered by G Suite. The only restriction is that the educational institution must have state accreditation and non-profit status.
Our university actively uses this service. Down with going to the dean's office to find out which couple is next. Everything is synchronized through a calendar and can be viewed on a smartphone. As well as the exam schedule. Important notifications and decrees are sent to everyone by email, as well as notifications about various interesting seminars, vacancies for students, summer schools, etc. For each logical unit (group, course, faculty, university), a mailing list has been created, and employees with the appropriate rights can send information there. At the introductory lecture for students, they said in plain text that checking the university box is very important, almost mandatory.
In addition, some teachers actively upload lecture materials to Google Drive and even create individual folders there to send homework. Others, however, are quite suitable for Moodle, which is not related to Google. Learn more about creating an account . The application review period is up to 2 weeks, but on the occasion of mass remote learning, Google promised to review and confirm them faster.
Google Colab
Great tool for Jupyter Notebook lovers. Available to any Google user. It is very convenient for both individual and collaborative work when studying something from the field of machine learning and data science. Allows you to train models on both CPU and GPU. However, for basic learning Python is also quite suitable. We actively used this tool on "Methods of Interpretation and Classification". .
The contours (for the sophisticated - one of the layers of the VGG16 neuron) of the Egyptian cat make the collaboration better
Google Classroom
An excellent LMS (learning management system) provided free of charge as one of the main products within the G Suite for Education, G Suite for Nonprofit packages, as well as for personal account holders. Also available as an additional service for regular G Suite accounts. The system of cross-permissions of access between different types of accounts is somewhat . In order not to get into the jungle, the easiest option is for all participants in the processes - teachers and students - to use accounts of the same type (either educational or personal).
The system allows you to create classes, publish text and video materials, Google Meet sessions (free for educational accounts), assignments, evaluate them, communicate with each other, etc. A very useful thing for those who are forced to study remotely, but who do not have specialists on staff to install and configure some other LMS. Cross the threshold of the class .
Educational materials
Google has prepared several different opportunities to learn how to work with their cloud services:
- Compilation available to listen to for free. Students from countries that are especially lucky are also given the opportunity to complete practical assignments for free (usually a paid service) and receive certificates in 13 courses from Google. However, Coursera provides upon request for your courses (i.e. just provide them for free if you can convince them that you really need it, but there is no money but you hold on). available completely free of charge until 31.07.2020.
- Another selection -
- talk about the opportunities and interesting cases created on the basis of Google Cloud.
- - a collection of articles and exercises, revealing various topics related to working with Google Cloud. Available for free to all Google users.
- - a selection of guides on completely different aspects of working with Google products. Pathways from the last point are ordered collections of labs from here.
Google for Education
A selection of Google services learning opportunities are only available in a limited number of countries. Roughly speaking, EU / EEA countries, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. I study in Latvia, so it turned out to warm my hands about these opportunities. If you are also studying in one of the countries mentioned, enjoy.
-
- 200 credits for completing interactive labs on Qwiklabs.
- Free access to paid versions of 13 courses from Coursera (already mentioned above).
- $50 Google Cloud Credits (temporarily unavailable at the time of writing; however, you can still get the $300 trial offered by default when activating a trial subscription).
- 50% off G Suite Certification.
- 50% discount on the Associate Cloud engineer exam (a faculty representative must register in the program).
-
- 5000 Qwiklabs credits to share with students.
- $300 Google Cloud credits for courses and events.
- $5000 Google Cloud Research Program Credits (per program).
- Career Readiness Program - Free learning materials and discounted Associate Cloud engineer certification for students and educators.
-
- Doctorate (PhD) applicants can receive $1000 Google Cloud credits for their research.
The official information says that Google is working on expanding the geography, but there is an assumption that it should not be expected soon.
Instead of a conclusion
I hope it was helpful. Share information with fellow students, faculty, and deans. If you know of any other educational offers from Google, write in the comments. Subscribe to us so as not to miss the continuation of various educational opportunities.
On our behalf, we also want to offer all students a 50% discount for the first year of using our ΠΈ and . For this you need , place an order and, without paying for it, write a ticket to the sales department, providing a photo of yourself with your student ID. An employee of the sales department will adjust the cost of your order in accordance with the terms of the promotion.
And that's it, there will be no other advertising.
Source: habr.com