Google Apps for Education is a cloud-based set of applications that enables teachers and students to communicate, collaborate, and create. Google Apps for Education have seen explosive growth since their introduction in 2010. As a long-time training partner with Google, Boost eLearning wanted to better understand the growth in number of users for this amazing tool set, and has produced a report about it on its eLearning Blog entitled "Google Apps for Education Anticipated to Reach 110 Million Users by 2020". The following consists of excerpts from the document.

Growth Rate

Google Apps for Education has grown from eight million users in 2010 to over forty million users as of February 2015. The user base includes students, faculty, and staff using Google Apps for Education, a free service for schools. This is an astounding 41% growth rate, which has actually started accelerating in the past year. Maintaining this rapid adoption of Google Apps for Education would result in 110 million users by 2020.

The five main factors that make us confident in the future growth of Google Apps for Education are as follows:

1. market size
2. power and quality of Google Apps for Education
3. importance of Google Classroom
4. adoption of Google Chromebooks
5. price

Of course, there are other factors such as aging infrastructure; in this report, we wanted to focus on the features that benefit the end user, which ultimately will drive the success of Google Apps for Education into the future.

Market size

The potential global market for students is a big one. There are over 865 million students in just the 9 most populated countries. When you include faculty and staff, especially for larger institutions, namely colleges and universities, this number could be over 1 billion worldwide.

To compile this data, we sourced public government reports that outline the amount of students, kindergarten through college, in each respective country.

With a current user base of 45 million, Google Apps for Education's market penetration is about 4.5%. Yet many of the largest markets are in developing countries. It will be years for the necessary infrastructure and connectivity to be in place for significant usage of technology in the classroom for those countries. What this simply means is that we are looking at a massive market that unfolds over time. As Google Apps for Education becomes standard in developed countries, the service will have large new markets waiting for it further down the road.

As of now, the US market including K-12 public schools, private schools, and colleges represents approximately 76 million students. With faculty and staff the market is 80.5 million potential users.

Power and quality of Google Apps for Education

Google Apps for Education is a complete suite of communication and collaboration cloud applications. Included in the suite are Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Sites, Groups, Google+, and Hangouts. Google Drive includes "The Docs Editors": Docs, Sheets, Forms, Slides, and Drawings. This a power suite of applications that are heavily integrated with one another for rapid communication and collaboration in the cloud.

What does heavily integrated mean? For example:

Google Calendar sends the students in a class an email reminder about an upcoming Hangout video call, with a link to the video call. In the video call, another student runs a Google Slides presentation and shares her computer screen with the rest of the class so everyone can see her Google Slides presentation.

After the presentation, the teacher sends the class a Google Form to fill out and provide feedback to the student about her presentation. The feedback from the Google Form will automatically output into a Google spreadsheet, which the student can save in her class folder in Google Drive, right next to her Slides presentation file.