How do IT giants help education? Part 1: Google

In my old age, at 33, I decided to go to a master’s program in computer science. I finished my first tower back in 2008 and not at all in the IT field, a lot of water has since flowed. Like any other student, also with Slavic roots, I was curious: what can I get for free (mainly in terms of additional knowledge in the specialty)? And, as soon as my past and present intersect closely with the hosting industry, the main choice fell on the giants that provide cloud services.

In my short cycle, I will talk about the educational opportunities that three leaders of the cloud services market offer to students, teachers and educational institutions (both universities and schools), as well as how some of them use our university. And I’ll start with Google.

Immediately after habrakat a little disappoint. Residents of the CIS countries are not very lucky. Some of the delicious Google For Education buns 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 truncated form, however. So let’s go.

G Suite for Education

Many of us love Gmail, Google Drive, and the hedgehogs with them. Particularly lucky even managed to capture free mail accounts for their domains, now known as the G Suite legacy free edition, which is gradually tightened with nuts. If anyone does not know, G Suite for Education is all the same, and even more.

Any school and any university can receive 10,000 licenses (and, correspondingly, accounts) for mail, disk, calendar and other cooperation opportunities offered by G Suite. The only limitation is that the educational institution must have state accreditation and non-profit status.

Our university actively uses this service. Down with the dean’s office to find out which pair is next. Everything is synchronized through the calendar and can be viewed on the smartphone. As well as the exam schedule. Important notices and decrees are sent to everyone by soap, as well as notifications of various interesting seminars, vacancies for students, summer schools, etc. A mailing list has been created for each logical unit (group, course, faculty, university), and employees with the appropriate rights can send information there. At the introductory lecture for students, they plainly said that checking the university box is very important, almost necessary.

In addition, some teachers actively upload lecture materials on Google Drive and even create individual folders for sending homework there. Others, however, are quite suitable for Moodle, not related to Google. Learn more about creating an account. can be read here. The deadline for considering the application is up to 2 weeks, but on the occasion of mass distance learning, Google promised to consider and confirm them faster.

Google colab

A great tool for fans of Jupyter Notebook. 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 the CPU and GPU. However, for basic learning Python is also quite suitable. We actively used this tool on the “Methods of interpretation and classification.” You can start a collaboration here.


The contours (for the sophisticated – one of the layers of the neuron VGG16) of an Egyptian cat make collaboration better

Google classroom

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 to personal account holders. Also provided as an additional service for regular G Suite accounts. The system of cross-access permissions between different types of accounts is somewhat confusing and non-trivial. 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 class threshold can be here.

Educational materials

Google has prepared several different opportunities to learn how to work with their cloud services:

  • Selection courses at Coursera available to listen for free. Students from countries that are particularly lucky are also given the opportunity to complete practical tasks for free (usually a paid service) and receive certificates for 13 courses from Google. However, Coursera provides upon request financial assistance to your courses (i.e. just provides them for free if you can convince them that you really need it, but there is no money but you hold on) Some courses Available completely free until 07/31/2020.
  • Another selection – on udacity
  • Cloud OnAir Webinars talk about the possibilities and interesting cases created on the basis of Google Cloud.
  • Google dev pathways – A selection of articles and exercises that cover various topics related to working with Google Cloud. Available for free to all Google users.
  • Codelabs – A selection of guides on completely different aspects of working with Google products. The paths from the last paragraph are ordered collections of labs from here.

Google for education

A certain selection of opportunities to study working with Google services is available only for 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 also study in one of the mentioned countries, enjoy.

  • Opportunities for students:
    • 200 credits for completing interactive lab tests on Qwiklabs.
    • Free access to paid versions of 13 courses from Coursera (already mentioned above).
    • $ 50 Google Cloud credits (temporarily not available at the time of writing; however, you can still get the test $ 300 offered by default when you activate a trial subscription).
    • 50% off G Suite certification.
    • 50% discount on the Associate Cloud engineer exam (a representative of the faculty must register in the program).
  • Faculty Opportunities:
    • 5,000 Qwiklabs credits to share with students.
    • $ 300 Google Cloud credits for courses and events.
    • $ 5,000 Google Cloud research program credits (per program).
    • Career Readiness Program – free training materials and discount on Associate Cloud engineer certification for students and teachers.
  • Opportunities for researchers:
    • Doctoral degree (PhD) applicants can receive $ 1,000 Google Cloud credits for their studies.

The official information says that Google is working to expand the geography, but there is an assumption that soon it should not be expected.

Instead of a conclusion

Hope it was helpful. Share information with familiar students, teachers, and deans. If you know any other educational suggestions from Google, write in the comments. Subscribe to us in order not to miss the continuation of the various educational opportunities.

On our behalf, we also want to offer all students a 50% discount for the first year of using our hosting services and cloud vps, and VPS with dedicated drives. For this you need register with us, make an order and, without paying for it, write a ticket to the sales department, providing a photo of yourself with your student. An employee of the sales department will adjust your order value in accordance with the terms of the promotion.

And yet, there will be no other advertising.

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