Delivering BYOD with AppsAnywhere for Students at Canada's Georgian College

Georgian College, Ontario Canada, is using the latest application virtualization technology from AppsAnywhere to help deliver the college’s BYOD strategy.

In the first months of the project, Georgian College has realized strategic benefits by being able to deliver 100% of attempted Windows apps to students in labs and provide the first step to a BYOD experience, all while reducing imaging time for the IT team.

Background to the university virtualization project - a first of its kind in Canada!

Established in 1967, Georgian College is known for attracting the best partnerships with local and international employers and for providing industry with highly skilled graduates to sustain and grow their operations. 

Georgian College is one of 24 publicly funded Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology in Ontario. Fostering a culture of entrepreneurship and innovation, Georgian prepares students to become not only job seekers, but also job creators. Georgian works together with industry and community partners to offer relevant, cutting-edge curriculum as well as quality work placements and co-op experiences. 

With more than 125 career-focused programs across seven locations in Central Ontario (Barrie, Midland, Muskoka, Orangeville, Orillia, Owen Sound and South Georgian Bay), Georgian serves 11,000 full-time students and 28,000 Part-time Studies registrants annually. 

Focused on being a leader in graduate employment and using technology to improve the student experience, the IT team identified the application virtualization and the S2Hub delivered by AppsAnywhere as a way to provide the next generation of student BYOD experience.

Virtualizing computer lab space

The pioneering team at Georgian College are the first Canadian HE institution to adopt Cloudpaging and the S2Hub. Initially the project focussed on delivering a range of applications required for summer course delivery into computer labs on campus. Within the first few months several dozen applications have been virtualized including those traditionally complex ones such as SPSS, Dragon Naturally Speaking and Sage 300.

This has enabled the IT team to reduce imaging time and also provide a more responsive service as the unique features of the solution enable patch management and updates to be completed quickly and easily.

• Georgian College have the AppsAnywhere solution available in all the academic computer labs at all 7 of the campuses. According to reporting nearly 1,400 academic PC workstations currently have the Cloudpaging client installed
• Over 30 applications packaged in the first four months. As the software requests for Fall semester come in, Georgian College are packaging new applications daily

The future of BYOD at Georgian College. Leading the way in Canadian HE.

The aim is to be able to provide any student at Georgian College with any Windows application to any device on and off campus. The aims include:

• Self Service. The ability for students to use the applications they need to get work done anywhere, anytime on any device
• Awesome student outcomes. By being able to work more freely students should have a better experience and study when it is needed rather than when apps are available.
• Apps Anywhere. By integrating S2Hub into the SharePoint Student Porta,l students will have simple one-stop access to their application needs
• Accessibility. The unique licensing capabilities allow accessible learning software to be made available more broadly and assist with efforts to adhere to government accessibility laws

We reviewed several virtualization technologies in the past but none matched our “application availability” vision quite like the AppsAnywhere solution. The virtualization technology from AppsAnywhere is allowing us to make software offerings more agile and personalized.

We're excited to offer this technology to our students, to give them the flexible computing experience they have asked for.

Sara Triskle, Georgian College Systems Administrator

Make no mistake, Georgian College are at the leading edge of the EdTech revolution in Canada. As the first institution in the region to embrace an awesome student BYOD project, Georgian College are focused on giving their students and staff an amazing experience.

BYOD is the future for colleges and universities, it’s what students expect, and we're looking forward to taking Georgian College to the next level of awesome!

Tony Austwick, AppsAnywhere Co-Founder