The IBM cloud for education: applications lab and Learn@IBM

IBM Cloud for Education Earlier this year, IBM formally launched the IBM Cloud for Education. It represents a single access point - "one stop shopping" - within its standard IBM Cloud menu, whereby faculty and students will be able to access an array of resources and services specifically addressing their in-classroom and research needs. These include the IBM Cloud Application Lab (based on the original Apache VCL open source cloud platform), Learn@IBM (a Moddle-based collection of educational modules initially developed by CAS Canada Lab), a library of pre-packaged software images and platforms popular with many academicians, and more - integrated with many of the most requested IBM services (including IBM Watson and AI, IoT, blockchain and more). Many of these images, platforms and modules have been created in partnership with university collaborators for their specific academic needs (including the Apache VCL cloud platform itself). The IBM Cloud for Education is therefore intended to become a repository of cloud-based reusable assets that are being developed for courses or projects around data/AI, security, blockchain, quantum computing and more. Most importantly, these solutions can be easily hybridized with an institution's on-premise infrastructure or edge devices, can support any operating system or hypervisor - as well as Kubernetes - and can be accessed by a simple browser on any device. They can even be deployed within any third party vendor's hosted cloud.