Hiroshima University: Delivering a next-generation education environment with the latest cloud technology for 15,000+ students
About Hiroshima University
Established in 1949 by merging seven public schools, including the Hiroshima University of Literature and Science, Hiroshima University is now a national general research university with 12 faculties and four graduate schools. Based on principles consisting of "spirit of seeking peace" and "creation of new knowledge," the university is the only one selected from the Chugoku-Shikoku region as a university to participate in the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology's 2014 SuperGlobal University Creation Support program.
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Contact usBy migrating to Google Cloud, Hiroshima University revamped its Learning Management System (LMS) without major disruptions, delivering a modernized learning environment to over 15,000 students and 3,650 faculty members.
Google Cloud results
- Revamps its LMS without any major issues during migration
- Achieves stable operation of LMS even during increased traffic over the course of the pandemic
- Provides performance reliability and stability needed to withstand unexpected loads
Builds an LMS that meets new DX initiatives within education
In 2001, Hiroshima University introduced a Learning Management System (LMS) ahead of many other universities, and began its operation throughout the university. Since then, it has been in operation for about 20 years, with major changes such as moving from on-premises to public cloud. However, existing systems were not able to deliver the performance required for analyzing large amounts of data, and there was a need for availability that could withstand the rapid increase in load brought on by the recent pandemic. As such, the university decided to move to a new system that operates on an open source LMS Moodle on Google Cloud.
As Professor Takahiro Sumiya of the Information Media Center explains, "The reason we changed the LMS was to realize the 'student-oriented education' required by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology's 'Digital University and Technical College Education Advancement Plan (Plus-DX).' It was necessary to introduce an open source LMS that was not bound by the number of licenses in order to conduct joint classes with other universities, high school-university cooperation classes, public lectures, and more. The reason we chose Google Cloud as a solution is because we wanted to use BigQuery to analyze the learning logs. In our conventional LMS, it took a considerable amount of time for aggregation processing, so we wanted to solve this problem with the migration."
"The reason we chose Google Cloud as a solution is because we wanted to use BigQuery to analyze the learning logs. In our conventional LMS, it took a considerable amount of time for aggregation processing, so we wanted to solve this problem with the migration."
—Professor Takahiro Sumiya, Information Media Center, Hiroshima University."The 'Hiroshima University DX Promotion Basic Plan' formulated by Hiroshima University in 2021 stipulates that the use of educational and learning data and the digitization of educational content should be addressed throughout the university. In addition to the migration, it is important to have a log analysis platform that can analyze necessary information at high speed and support learning and work quickly, so we had high expectations for BigQuery," adds Associate Professor Tohru Kondo, of the Information Media Center. "It also supports the Gakunin cloud service of the science information network SINET6 provided by the National Institute of Informatics, and has high security performance that has been highly evaluated by the Security Evaluation System for Government Information Systems (ISMAP), and the ease of management with the Operations suite."
Leveraging managed services to focus on what should be done
The diagram above is a system configuration diagram of the new "Hiroshima University's Moodle" that has been in operation since March 2022. Run on Compute Engine, it saves students' submissions and teaching material files uploaded by the faculty to Compute Engine's regional Persistent Disk. Learning course settings are recorded in the fully managed Cloud SQL, and various logs are stored in BigQuery. According to Associate Professor Kondo, "We have adopted a simple structure that takes sustainability into consideration."
"Previously, we had to look at what kind of server configuration to build, and there were a lot of challenges there, but this time, the migration went very smoothly. I feel that one of the benefits of introducing Google Cloud is that we were able to focus on the most important points , such as setting up the Moodle," shares Professor Sumiya. Although it has only been a few months since the full-scale operation of Moodle and Google Cloud "Hiroshima University's Moodle," he adds that he is already seeing benefits.
"I've only been using it for a few months, but I haven't had any of the challenges similar to what I experienced in the spring of 2020, when the number of users suddenly increased six to seven times, due to the impact of the pandemic. The increase in the amount of access this time is still large. It is reliable that the load has hardly increased even in such a situation. In the future, depending on the tuning, we will change the configuration and lower the cost. Teachers who have used it have said that it is more intuitive and easier to use than our previous system. Personally, I feel that it has a very rich set of features that I could use for teaching and research, and I am enjoying thinking about how I can use it to my advantage, including for administrative tasks.
"From a technical point of view, it is unique that users access Moodle using the HTTP/3 protocol based on Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC), instead of HTTP/1.1 or HTTP/2.1 think this is a function that is only possible because of the use of Google Cloud's Cloud Load Balancing. Users are completely unaware of this, but it is expected to improve performance even in mobile communication, and can be used in a variety of environments. I think it contributes to improving the user experience. I found it interesting that the technology used by Google for its search engine and YouTube is also used in LMS," says Associate Professor Kondo.
"From a technical point of view, it is unique that users access Moodle using the HTTP/3 protocol based on Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC), instead of HTTP/1.1 or HTTP/2.1 think this is a function that is only possible because of the use of Google Cloud's Cloud Load Balancing. Users are completely unaware of this, but it is expected to improve performance even in mobile communication, and can be used in a variety of environments."
—Associate Professor Tohru Kondo, Information Media Center, Hiroshima University.Deeper utilization with Google Workspace for education
The 2022 academic year was a transitional period for Hiroshima University's Moodle, which operates in parallel with the existing LMS. It was decided that the existing LMS will be discontinued and completely migrated to Moodle and Google Cloud, starting in 2023. "I'm thinking about various future initiatives, but I would like to try linking with Google Workspace. In response to a request from within the university, Google Workspace was introduced throughout the university in August 2021. Currently, there are several thousand users, and I believe that by linking this with Google Cloud, we will be able to encourage students to use the cloud even more," adds Associate Professor Kondo.
"I have started using Google Workspace in my classes, and Google Colaboratory is very easy to use. I think it has been very useful for data science education," says Professor Sumiya.
"Hiroshima University has been actively introducing public clouds from quite early on. We have used various services before, but compared to them, Google Cloud is simple, including the management console. That's why I was particular about the simplicity of this system, as I expect that it will be effective in terms of operation in the future. The LMS that we have introduced now will continue to operate for many years to come. We would like to work on further deepening its utilization, including log analysis that makes full use of BigQuery," concludes Associate Professor Kondo.
"Hiroshima University has been actively introducing public clouds from quite early on. We have used various services before, but compared to them, Google Cloud is simple, including the management console. That's why I was particular about the simplicity of this system, as I expect that it will be effective in terms of operation in the future."
—Associate Professor Tohru Kondo, Information Media Center, Hiroshima University.Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
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About Hiroshima University
Established in 1949 by merging seven public schools, including the Hiroshima University of Literature and Science, Hiroshima University is now a national general research university with 12 faculties and four graduate schools. Based on principles consisting of "spirit of seeking peace" and "creation of new knowledge," the university is the only one selected from the Chugoku-Shikoku region as a university to participate in the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology's 2014 SuperGlobal University Creation Support program.