Education: Partnership with Académie de Rennes
Companies & administrations

Education: Partnership with Académie de Rennes

4 min read

Cozy Cloud is partnering with the "Académie de Rennes" to extend its personal cloud offering to the education sector. A look back at the implementation of this first pilot project.

kimberly-farmer-lUaaKCUANVI-unsplashPhoto : Kimberly Farmer (Unsplash)

The objective of the pilot is to provide a Cozy personal space for nearly 5000 students and teachers to :

  • offer a tool for storing documents, accessible online or offline, on any media, from home or school;
  • encourage the sharing of documents between different audiences, within a class, between colleagues or classmates;
  • support the reappropriation of data by these audiences, with a tool that complies with the General Data Protection Regulations (RGPD).

My new personal work environment, which can be moved, which protects my personal data and which follows me throughout my schooling and my working life.

With these words, Olivier Adam, Digital Technical Director of the Rennes academy, turned to Cozy Cloud with this wish for an open-source tool, giving back control of data to its owners.

Responding to uses in accordance with the DP Regs

This is the "headache" of the players in the world of education, anxious to provide services that respond to new uses while protecting the integrity and confidentiality of the data hosted.

Nomadism has become the norm

Pupils and teachers are working at school, in transport, at home, from equipment provided by the school, using their own or their parents' equipment. Their data must be accessible from any equipment and from anywhere.
Some tools, especially those related to online storage, are often only accessible from the school premises.

This is a bitter observation for the "Académie de Rennes", which wishes to offer services that meet these increasingly nomadic needs and which are pushing a growing number of users towards tools published by GAFA.

In this ecosystem and as is often the case, the data are linked to the tools and not to the users. By making this partnership with Cozy Cloud, the "Académie de Rennes" wants to break this paradigm.

Collaborative work increasingly adopted

Teaching methods are evolving and require more group work by students, whether one-off or over several years, as in the case of TPEs.
The digital work environment must encourage the pooling, collaboration and sharing of documents.
Cozy allows this exchange of documents between personal spaces. It will also soon be possible to edit documents directly online, thus facilitating group work on all media.

Promoting data portability

The ecosystem provided by the "Académie de Rennes" offers several digital services from different publishers. These tools, organized in silos, host the various data themselves and can for the most part erase them at the end of a school year.
When students leave the school system to enter the workforce, to pursue higher education or change academy, they lose their access to the ecosystem provided by the academy of Rennes and therefore their data.

Cozy makes this portability possible. The data, once saved in the student's or teacher's personal cloud, remains accessible at all times, even after they leave the academy.

A Cozy for students and teachers

The academy already provides its users with a personal cloud (or Personal Digital Space) that can be moved and secured. Pupils and teachers can store their data and documents, without any intervention or view of anyone or any third party tool.

photo-eleves-tablette-photo-katemangostar-freepik
Photo : Kate Mangostar (Freepik)

On 24 May (2019), the first users of a high school in Vitré (Ille-et-Vilaine) were accompanied in the creation of their Cozy. Today, nearly 1,000 people have the opportunity to create their own personal cloud from the ecosystem offered by the Rennes academy.

Within these specific Cozies, users will be able to retrieve a personalised address book, in order to facilitate the exchange of documents.

Other specific features are planned for the future: being able to edit documents online and in groups, being able to retrieve documents from the services offered by the other tools in the ecosystem, etc.

A textbook case for Cozy

Cozy Cloud is delighted to be associated with the Rennes Academy's initiative and to enable players in the world of education to give back control of data to its users.

This awareness of privacy protection and control of personal data is already included in teaching programmes. This project provides a concrete illustration of this to these citizens in the making.

Cozy Cloud takes a close interest in the school and university world.
Because of this observation of tools for ephemeral use when the data produced is essential and lost at the end of the school year, because of the increasing nomadic use, the need for sharing and collaborative work, and the desire to use open source tools that comply with current regulations on personal data, Cozy is a logical and obvious response.

Bring your own Cloud

In order to overcome the inequalities in computer equipment in schools, the Ministry of National Education has launched a recent consultation on "Bring your own device" (BYOD).
Cozy's approach is more "Bring your own Cloud" (BYOC).
Regardless of the terminal, it is the virtual workspace that must be accessible whatever the conditions of use. And it is up to him to ensure that personal data is secure and fully respected.

Articles, links and resources

  • Other territorial actors, with the support of the FING, also have this approach of giving back the control of the data to the users ("Self Data"). During a first day of meetings of these actors working in other fields such as transport or energy, the Académie de Rennes illustrated this case study which is very real and already in place in some of their middle schools and high schools.
Céline Steyer

Céline Steyer