65,000 in Open University Malaysia use Google Apps Education Edition

The Institution

When the Open University Malaysia (OUM) was established in August 2001, Malaysia had its first open and distance learning (ODL) university. The OUM is owned by the 11 early Malaysian public universities through the holding company Meteor Sdn Bhd. The OUM has 65,000 active students, the majority being 20 to 50 years of age.

The OUM practices the blended approach to ODL: learning takes place via printed modules, face-to-face interactions and online support. Students attend fortnightly face-to-face sessions at 62 learning centres throughout the country, while accessing online resources such as courseware and the digital library. Students also have online discussions with their peers and tutors. In order to facilitate this web-based teaching-learning process and timeliness of administration, the OUM places great emphasis on high availability access to web-based services and email.

The Challenge

Based on SquirrelMail, the OUM's old email was starting to age. Erection of filters to minimize spam access to email was excruciatingly slow. Staff and students were also starting to demand better email features, more storage and better quality of service.

Prof Dr Ahmad Hashem, General Manager of Meteor Technology and Consultancy Sdn Bhd shared that they extensively researched and shortlisted two free email providers. "The OUM technical support team communicated with the technical staff of each provider and they were convinced that the Google team can offer better support. The choice of Google Apps Education Edition was thus made after very careful studies were carried out."

In just two weeks, the OUM technical team liaised with the Google team to set up accounts and switch users from the old mail to the new mail. "We did some straw polls among students and the feedback was very positive," says Dr Hashem.

"Before full deployment we did a week-long small pilot among several selected staff. We were quite pleased with the experience during this pilot phase. We then asked Google for 100,000 accounts. This was the slow part. Google gave accounts in batches of 2000. So it took us a bit of time to migrate about 65,000 accounts for students and about 7000 accounts for tutors." "Our experience with the switchover has been quite painless. There were no complaints at all from staff and students after the switchover. For a month, there were queries on how to carry out certain tasks in the new environment. The applications have been taken for granted and people are looking at using all the available options."

The Results

All 65,000 enrolled students and staff in the OUM are currently using all the Google Apps applications. Gmail is most widely used, while Google Talk now supplements the forum function in the OUM's Learning Management System. Google Calendar and Google Documents are used by the OUM's departments and workgroups.

Now, the OUM's email is faster and more reliable. Says Dr Hashem, "We used to be able to provide about 99% uptime. GMail has so far proven 100%."

With this adoption, hardware and bandwidth has also been freed up. The university now saves on the finances required to provide each user with 2GB of mail storage, and the thousands of dollars they used to spend on licenses for their virus and spam filter.

"The firewall used to be operating at almost 100% capacity. We were on the verge of upgrading to a higher capacity firewall that was very expensive. It is now operating at around 70% capacity and likely to remain at this capacity for the near future. We have thus bought a bit more time. The two technicians who used to spend a large amount of their time monitoring and maintaining the email services can now be deployed elsewhere."

To others implementing Google Apps Education Edition, Dr. Hashem offers some advice: "Compile a list of requirements. We looked at the following: high-availability, support both POP and IMAP, encryption of email, support single sign-on, compatible with all major browsers, can customize to reflect own identity, non-obtrusive advertisement, if any." Dr Hashem shared that implementing Google Apps Education Edition "does not really require any technical expertise. There is an extensive FAQ provided and also if required, the Google team can hand-hold until completion of the implementation. They are responsive to email queries."

About Google Apps Education Edition

Google Apps Education Edition is a free suite of hosted communication & collaboration applications designed for schools and universities. Google Apps includes Gmail (webmail services), Google Calendar (shared calendaring), Google Talk (instant messaging and voice over IP), Google Docs (online document creation & sharing) and a Start Page for creating a customizable homepage on a specific domain, as well as administrative tools, customer support, and access to APIs to integrate Google Apps with existing IT systems.


...or to learn more, sign up for an online seminar.