Berlin – The school cloud of the Hasso Plattner Institute, whose funding the federal government had significantly expanded in the spring due to Corona, is used only little. This emerges from a response from the Federal Ministry of Education to a written question from the deputy FDP parliamentary group leader Katja Suding, which the newspapers of the Funke media group (Monday editions) report on.
Accordingly, 356 schools are currently actively using the cloud as part of the federal program. 496 schools are registered. The federal government had funded the cloud with 12 million euros so that all those schools can use it that do not already have access to a comparable cloud solution via a state project. According to the Federal Ministry of Education, the cloud was already used in spring by many high schools with a MINT focus. Suding criticized the project as bad planning: “Hardly more than one percent of all schools have decided in favor of the HPI school cloud because of this opening,” she told the Funke newspapers. This means that the project “even falls short of the federal government’s already low expectations”. Instead of supporting schools with individual and market-ready solutions, additional millions would be put into an already well-financed cloud, whose functions lag far behind other providers, criticized Suding. “Even if the pandemic will not be over by then, the funding for the opening of the HPI school cloud will expire at the end of the year. What the 356 newly acquired user schools will do afterwards is completely unclear.”
