SoftLayer, an IBM company, will supply cloud infrastructure to St. Thomas University (STU) to support its new classroom curricula and collaborative research projects.
The cloud-based solution will enable students and faculty to launch initiatives in scientific research, mobile banking, sports administration and electronic medical recordkeeping.
As part of STU’s transformation effort, IBM will deliver six virtualized servers as well as work with STU to educate and train students on how to utilize cloud computing, provision servers, and move workloads.
Access to IBM Business Analytics software will give students the ability to work on real industry projects, like exploring use of analytics tools to analyze sports stadium statistics and operations for Sun Life Stadium, an IBM customer.
The SoftLayer platform will assist students to access to case studies, white papers and other teaching materials through the IBM Academic initiative portal which is an IBM hosted website with 3 million students, 25,000 faculty staff from 5,000 institutions globally.
STU has already observed significant improvement in enrollment after offering cloud computing enabled research facility providing lab capabilities to students. For instance, enrollment in physical sciences has increased by 30 percent.
In addition, in a single year, the retention rate across STU’s science disciplines has increased by 30 percent as well.
Michael D King, vice president, Global Education Industry at IBM, said: “Education technology solutions via the cloud are a great way for educators to connect with students in the new age of computing.”
