Educational Alternatives, Volume 16, 2018

Abstract: The proposed material considers the reform in education systems around the world as an inevitable necessity and arguments the need to use reliable, secure, accessible and scalable ICT infrastructure for the needs of innovative and modern learning. The knowledge economy poses new challenges to education and learning environments, and not all educational institutions are prepared to respond adequately to the increased and highly demanding requirements. At the same time, many of the global IT leaders, for various reasons, mainly related to their long-term business goals, have all the resources needed to provide the necessary conditions for advanced learning and training methodologies (augmented reality, process simulation etc.) and could be used accordingly. In order to preserve the learning diversity and the development of innovative thinking, direct implementation of ready-made corporate models on the learning process is usually inappropriate, and the decision to combine academic freedom with the corporate opportunities turns out to be the winning combination. The article examines the hypothesis that a large number of universities around the globe have purchased or developed distance learning platforms, situated in their private ICT infrastructure, but such data and application centers have relatively modest computing resources and often suffer from a lack of adequate technical support, computing capacity or disk resources. At the same time, global providers of ICT services such as Google and Microsoft, who develop their business on a long-term basis, can satisfy a significant part of such needs, upgrading their infrastructure on the fly, without in any way endangering their other businesses. One of the main challenges for innovative 21st century lecturers is to find the balance of combining educational services offered by their own academic infrastructure and the capabilities of the large IT players in order to optimize resources, time and expertise.