Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus case study

Challenge: transitioning away from file servers 

Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus (SFC) was founded in 1990 with the aim of fostering innovative approaches to education to create a practical learning program fit for the 21st century. Its advanced education infrastructure was developed under the leadership of Professor Jun Murai, also known as the father of the internet in Japan. To this day, the campus develops its digital network to ensure it continues to support its teaching and research activities. 

The file management system, a platform where students and professors interact, is a key part of this. For some time, Keio University had followed a policy of using both on-premises file servers and cloud storage services across its campuses. However, its file servers were experiencing several outages a year, while workload and recovery management costs kept going up. The university staff could feel that their infrastructure was reaching its limit.

“We mainly needed on-premises for security reasons, but in recent years cloud storage has become secure enough for us to rely on. We felt it was time to shift pretty much everything over to cloud storage, with the exception of a small number of files.” explains Professor Jin Nakazawa from the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies at SFC.

This led SFC to spearhead an IT infrastructure change within the university. It began to consider various aspects of the switchover, including the campus’s cloud storage solutions. “Up to that point, the university had mainly used Google Drive and Box, but we didn’t find them all that user-friendly,” says Professor Nakazawa. For SFC, the biggest pain point was that they needed to open a browser to access folders in the cloud. As some students were unfamiliar with PCs and the cloud, SFC knew that it needed an environment that’d be intuitive for all of its users. 

 

Solution: simplify requesting files and storing data 

After reviewing their options, SFC chose to go with Dropbox. Alongside its advanced security and as much storage capacity that they needed, the SFC faculty rated the Dropbox user interface highly. They appreciated how folders are displayed on the desktop and can be used in the same way as local folders.

All Keio University SFC students and faculty members have started using Dropbox, with 7,000 licenses activated. Over the first few months, 55 terabytes of data had been uploaded and used for a variety of purposes.

“We didn’t make Dropbox mandatory university-wide because each of our professors has their own approach to lectures and research. Instead, we’ve been using different types of cloud storage for different purposes. Within that ecosystem, Dropbox is our main shared workspace for students and faculty,” Professor Nakazawa explains.

Dropbox has brought many benefits. For example, student-faculty exchanges became much more streamlined. “In my lectures, I use Dropbox to share materials and files with students, and I also use communication tools such as Slack and LINE to enhance group work” adds Professor Nakazawa. SFC also uses Dropbox as a data storage solution for Slack. 

SFC professors also find Dropbox useful when giving classes at the university’s affiliated high schools. Specifically, they use the file request feature to collect assignments and other submissions. “Unlike the university, where students and staff can access lectures via the LMS (Learning Management System), the high schools don’t have digital systems in place. That’s why we’re using Dropbox to make assignment submissions paperless,” explains Professor Nakazawa. 

 

Results: boosted digitale transformation 

To improve IT literacy, SFC also promotes a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) initiative, in which students use their own computers for study. This has led to major changes, including the removal of on-campus computer rooms in April 2020. And Dropbox has been indispensable in helping keep this initiative on course. 

“The pandemic made face-to-face lectures difficult. However, thanks to BYOD and Dropbox, we could continue lecturing online without any major disruption,” says Professor Nakazawa. Dropbox is making a significant contribution to the digital transformation of learning and sustainability.

And Professor Nakazawa has also reaped the benefits in his own research activities. He can now exchange files with researchers in Japan and overseas more easily as he works to promote collaborative research.

“It really has become an indispensable tool,” Professor Nakazawa continues. 

For example, Dropbox Paper, which allows multiple users to edit the same document in the cloud, has proven incredibly useful. SFC faculty have also found new ways to streamline their research efforts with Dropbox Paper’s task list feature, such as by coordinating international conferences and checking organizers’ notes in real time.

Going forward, they plan to further increase uptake by promoting Dropbox on campus. “By communicating the benefits, we hope to increase the number of active Dropbox users among both students and staff,” says Professor Nakazawa. 

Integrating Dropbox with Canvas LMS, an e-learning system that Keio University will soon introduce across its campuses, will likely form a key part of this plan. Connecting Dropbox and Canvas LMS would enable students to access files on Dropbox from both the e-learning system and their own computers.

Professor Nakazawa has high hopes: “We should be able to integrate the systems, and this will increase user-friendliness and expand our possibilities in both education and research.”

With Dropbox’s support, SFC uses cloud services to boost the digital transformation of teaching and research.