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Google Apps and the New American University

10/23/2006

By Adrian Sannier, Arizona State University

This month Arizona State University (ASU) and Google made the first large-scale deployment of Google Apps for Education, to the ASU student community. In just under two weeks, ASU and Google managed to:

  • Integrate ASU’s single sign-on, allowing students to use their existing ASURite UserID to log in to Gmail for ASU
  • Modify the EMMA client to allow student users to convert to Gmail for ASU with a single click
  • Create a staggering 65,000 new Gmail for ASU accounts
  • Create clear messaging to communicate the news to the ASU community and to the world
Adrian Sannier

Adrian Sannier

This was a story of speed. On the day of our announcement at EDUCAUSE, students were converting to Gmail for ASU at the rate of 300 per hour. But in addition to providing an exciting new service for students, ASU’s University Technology Office was using the Google alliance as a way to demonstrate the agility of the “New American University.”

University President Michael Crow is reshaping Arizona State into a new kind of institution; a New American University that uniquely combines academic excellence, access, and impact. The New American University is a reconception of the 20th century research university intended to meet new challenges and capitalize on the new opportunities presented by the 21 st century. At its core, the New American University will define itself not by who it excludes, but by who it includes. It will distinguish itself by the quality of its output, rather than the quality of its input.

The United States has many excellent universities that in many ways represent the highest expression of higher education. But these institutions at the very pinnacle of academic excellence serve only the relative few, and this is by design. Central to their strategy for continued excellence is extreme selectivity in the students they serve.

The United States also has many colleges and universities that strive to provide access to higher education, struggling to make the experience affordable and valuable to the masses not served by the nation’s elite schools. As demand for higher education grows and the gap between excellent and “adequate” widens, the tiered approach will not suffice.



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