[ieee 2012 international conference on cloud computing technologies, applications and management...

E-Learning Based on Cloud Computing Majid Shirzad

Payam noor University Mahmoudabad, Mazandaran, Iran

mshm [email protected]

Mehdi Ahmadipour Education Department - Mahmoudabad

Mahmoudabad, Mazandaran, Iran ahmadipour _ [email protected]

Abstract- The popularity of learning of the internet, the

construction of perfect web-based learning environment has

become one of the hot points on researching remote education.

Cloud computing is growing rapidly, with applications in almost

any area, including education. E-Iearning systems usually require

many hardware and software resources. There are many

education institutions that cannot afford such investments, and

cloud computing is the best solution . This paper presents the

positive impact of using cloud computing architectures upon E

learning solutions development. If focuses on the benefits of cloud

computing for e-Iearning solutions and the e-Iearning project

management challenges when this architectures is used.

Keywords- cloud computing, e-Iearning, education

information technology

Introduction)

Cloud computing allows to move the processing effort from the local devices to the data center facilities. The software is seen as a service and the applications and data are stored on multiple servers that can be accessed from the Internet.

Educational institutions have become dependent on the information technologies (IT) to support skill providing to the students. Schools often lack the resources or ability to take full advantage of information technology. One of the newest technologies in IT world is cloud computing that has a significant impact on teaching and learning. The cloud computing technology offers a way to expand the accessibility of education, particularly in remote and underserved communities. Students and teachers have the opportunity to quickly access various application platforms and resources through the web pages on demand.

The access can be provided through virtual classrooms, with students attending classes in their own homes on their own computers, with the teacher being present hundreds of kilometers away [1]. Many schools are already moving in this direction.

Also, the e-Iearning systems need to keep the pace with the technology, so the new direction is to use

Ali Hoseinpanah Graduate of Azad University- Hamedan

Hamedan Iran [email protected]

Hojat Rahimi Education Department - Mahmoudabad

Mahmoudabad, Mazandaran, Iran ahmadipour _ [email protected]

cloud computing .There are several cloud computing services providers that offer support for educational systems. Among the mare Amazon, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft etc. In [2] are presented the main advantages of using cloud computing in schools.

The following sections focus on cloud computing concepts and the benefits of cloud computing for e-Iearning solutions. Also, the impact on e-Iearning solutions based on cloud computing project management is analyzed. This is very important for the development of e-Iearning solutions based on cloud computing.

I. CLOUD COMPUTING

CLOUD COMPUTING IS AN EMERGING COMPUTING MODEL BY

WHICH USERS CAN GAIN ACCESS TO THEIR APPLICATIONS

FROM ANYWHERE, THROUGH ANY CONNECTED DEVICE. THE

CONCEPT OF CLOUD COMPUTING HAS EVOLVED FROM THE

CONCEPTS OF GRID COMPUTING, UTILITY COMPUTING AND

SOFTWARE AS A SERVICE (SAAS) [3]. IT IS AN EMERGING

MODEL THROUGH WHICH USER GAIN ACCESS TO THEIR

APPLICATIONS FROM ANYWHERE AT ANY TIME THROUGH

THEIR CONNECTED DEVICES. A USER-CENTRIC INTERFACE

MAKES THE CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE SUPPORTING THE

APPLICATIONS TRANSPARENT TO USERS. THE APPLICATIONS

RESIDE IN MASSIVELY SCALABLE DATA CENTERS WHERE

COMPUTATIONAL RESOURCES CAN BE DYNAMICALLY

PROVISIONED AND SHARED TO ACHIEVE SIGNIFICANT

ECONOMIES OF SCALE. THANKS TO A STRONG SERVICE

MANAGEMENT PLATFORM, THE MANAGEMENT COSTS OF

ADDING MORE IT RESOURCES TO THE CLOUD

can be significantly lower than those associated with alternate infrastructures. Vendors across the IT industry have announced cloud computing efforts of varying capabilities and among corporate clients there is an increasing interest in aspects of the cloud, such as infrastructure outsourcing, software as a service key processes as a service and nextgeneration distributed computing.

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A. Cloud computing is both a business delivery model and an irifrastructure management methodology. The business

delivery model provides a user experience by which hardware, software and network resources are optimally

leveraged to provide innovative services over the Web, and servers are provisioned in accordance with the logical

needs of the service using advanced, automated tools. The cloud then enables the service creators, program

administrators and others to use these services via a Webbased interface that abstracts awcry the complexity of the

underlying dynamic irifrastructure. The irifrastructure management methodology enables IT organizations to

manage large numbers of highly virtualized resources as a

single large resource. It also allows IT organizations to

massively increase their data center resources without significantly increasing the number of people traditionally

required to maintain that increase. For organizations currently using traditional infrastructures, a cloud will

enable users to consume IT resources in the data center in ways that were never available before. Companies that

employ traditional data center management practices know that making IT resources available to an end user

can be time intensive. It involves many steps, such as procuring hardware; finding raised floor space and

sufficient power and cooling; allocating administrators to install operating systems, middleware and software;

provisioning the network; and securing the environment. Most companies find that this process can take upwards of

two to three months. Those IT organizations that are reprovisioning existing hardware resources find that it still

takes several weeks to accomplish. A cloud dramatically

alleviates this problem by implementing automation,

business workjlows and resource abstraction that allows a user to browse a catalog of IT services, add them to a

shopping cart and submit the order. After an administrator approves the order, the cloud does the rest. This process

reduces the time required to make those resources available to the customer from months to minutes [4].

Cloud computing can increase the utilization of resources and hence reduce the IT hardware requirements. It potentially

reduce the global C02 emission by virtualization at the hardware and software level [5J, making abstraction of

resources for multiple execution environments. Network virtualization can offer an abstraction of the network for

resource provisions in cloud computing. Multiple virtual networks can run simultaneously over a single physical

infrastructure without interfering with each other. Path

virtualization accelerates the packet forwarding process in

the network since it can combine multiple channels into a routing path. It can also potentially reduce the energy used

in routing. The high level description of the data center is

support of dynamic irifrastructure with underlying

technology enablers such as virtualization, automation provisioning, monitoring and capacity planning.

148441192: E-Learning Based on Cloud Computing

Cloud computing provides different services rather than a unit of product. These services put forwarded 3 models: software as a service (SAAS), platform as a Service (p AAS), and infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) [6]

A. SAAS

(Software as a service) is a software distribution model, designed for web delivery, user can deploy and access through the Internet hosting. SAAS providers need to build information for all network infrastructure, software, hardware, operating platform, and is responsible for the implementation of all postmaintenance and other services. Compared with the traditional method of service, SAAS not only reduces the cost of traditional software licensing, and vendors deploy application software on a unified server, eliminating the end-user's server hardware, network security devices and software upgrade and maintenance expenses, the customer does not need other IT investment in addition personal computers and Internet connections to obtain the required software and services.

B. PAAS

Platform layer correspond to P AAS (Platform as a service) that made a higher level of abstraction on the base of lAAS layer.to Provides a development environment, test environment, server platforms and other services, users can develop applications based on Internet and other servers service providers infrastructure ,then share it to other users.

C. lAAS

Infrastructure layer corresponds to IAAS infrastructure services, is the lowest layer of the network. Users can household to provide standard services, including computing power and storage resources. It turn the memory, storage and computing power into a virtual whole resource pool for the entire industry to provide the required of computing power and storage resources[ll].

There are four types of cloud computing models listed by [7]: private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud and community cloud:

Public Cloud: it is for the general public where resources, web applications, web services are provided over the internet and any user can get the services from the cloud,. Public Organizations helps in providing the infrastructure to execute the public cloud.

Private Cloud: It is used by the organizations internally and is for a single organization, anyone within the organization can access the data, services and web applications but users outside the organizations cannot access the cloud. Infrastructure of private cloud are completely managed and corporate data are fully maintained by the organization itself.

Proceedings of2012 International of Cloud Computing, Technologies, Applications & Management 215

internal or external suppliers of cloud services are used. It is being used by most of the organizations [8].

Community Cloud: The cloud is basically the mixture of one or more public, private or hybrid clouds, which is shared by many organization for a single cause (mostly security).Infra structured is to be shared by several organizations within specific community with common security, compliance objectives. It is managed by third party or managed internally. Its cost is lesser then public cloud but more than private cloud.

III. E-LEARNING BENEFITS

Many education institutions do not have the resources and infrastructure needed to run top e-Iearning solution. This is why Blackboard and Moodie, the biggest players in the field of e-Iearning software, have now versions of the base applications that are cloud oriented. E-Iearning is widely used today on different educational levels: continuous education, company trainings, academic courses, etc.

There are various e-Iearning solutions from open source to commercial. There are at least two entities involved in an elearning system: the students and the trainers.

The students:

Take online course

Take exams

Send feedback

Send homework, projects

The trainers

Deal with content management

Prepare tests

Assess tests, homework, projects taken by students

Send feedback

Communicate with students (forums)

Majid Shirzad. Mehdi Ahmadipour, Ali Hoseinpanah, Hojat Rahimi

IV. FRAMEWORK FOR CLOUD BASED ELEARNING

A. The base layer of e-Iearning cloud

The base layer of e-Iearning cloud shares IT infrastructure resources and connects the huge system pool together to provide services. Cloud Computing allows the hardware layer to run more like the internet, to make the hardware resources shared and accessed as data resources in secure and scalable way. Virtualization technology separates the physical hardware from operating system, which on one hand can make computing and storage capacity of the existing server into

smaller size and re-integration, to improve the utilization and flexibility of IT resource; on the other hand can provide a common interface for large-scale cloud computing integration that enables the publication of calculation. The base layer can provide the basic hardware resources for the platform layer, and the users can also make use of it as the same as using a local device to use.

B. The Platform Layer of E-Learning Cloud

With the support of the powerful hardware, platform layer carries out the tasks of data storage, computing and software development, and it can even achieve the tasks of completion of the original mass data storage, business intelligence processing and so on which have been difficult to complete. Users can choose the devices and the number of devices according to the complexity of dealing with the content. Virtualization technology enables the platform to show a strong level of flexibility.

C. The application layer of e-Iearning cloud

The applications software or services provided by a school or university, the students to pay in the similar way of on-demand access, according to the amount to calculate the cost, complete the production, marketing, trading and management. .ELearning cloud environment provides user-oriented ubiquitous adaptive hardware resources, computing environment and software services. In e-Iearning cloud space, users can access to digital services transparently at any time in anywhere. The users can obtain the necessary network and computing services very naturally at any position. The information space and physical space will be integrated because of ubiquitous computing capability. And the ubiquitous information terminals together with the embedded system equipment will be the vehicles of e-commerce in the future.

V. E-LEARNING APPLICATION MODEL BASED ON CLOUD COMPUTING

With the progress and application of technology, the emergence of cloud computing offers e-Iearning good opportunity to develop, so we are convinced that it also can resolve the problem mentioned above properly. School or the


enterprise neither needs to worry about the construction of the environment of e-Iearning software and hardware nor invest enonnous capital and human and material resources to construct the system. All those issues can be handed to service providers of e-Iearning cloud, who can customize for users. In e-Iearning cloud model, data storage is highly distributed, data management is highly centralized and data service is highly virtualization, all of which offer a much safer data service. Intelligent business policy-making. E-Ieaning cloud environment provides large data center in which mass data storage, high-speed computation. This architecture for the cloud platform provides a variety of user interface fonns, such as Web Service interfaces, Java interfaces, C interfaces, Shell interface etc. Cloud computing platfonn provide resources services to teachers and students in the fonn of rental. A module is designed to which is based on the consumption billing to ensure that users only pay for the resources they have used.

A promise of the cloud computing is the virtualization will reduce the number of servers required. Therefore, the key is to identify the user to meet the expected demand for the infrastructure needed to balance the amount of cloud: too few computing resources, the request from the user must wait for the release of resources or reject those requests until more hardware is added to the environment. Too much computing resources, hardware costs and other expenses will be denied cost-cutting promises of cloud computing. In the cloud platfonn, teachers and administrators enter their requests for IT resources website (server, software, storage, etc.), can immediately know whether these resources are available. If resources are available, submit a request immediately and automatically routed to the cloud administrator for approvaL This process is automated, so it can be met in a very short period of time. Resource use planning and management are important activities of the cloud. Handled properly, the plan will provide needed capacity computing resources to create new solutions and to meet application performance goals, promote teaching and researching goals. [6]

The VDC-OS expands virtual infrastructure along three dimensions. First, it delivers a set of infrastructure services (called Infrastructure v Services) to seamlessly aggregate servers, storage and network as a pool of on-premise cloud resources and allocate them to applications that need them most. Second, it delivers a set of application services (called Application v Services) to guarantee the right levels of availability, security and scalability to all applications independent of the operating system, development frameworks or architecture on which they were built to run. Third, the VDC-OS delivers a set of cloud services (called Cloud v Services)[7]. Unlike a traditional OS, which is optimized for a single server and supports only those applications written to its interfaces, the VDC-OS serves as the OS for the entire datacenter and supports the full diversity of any application written to any OS, from legacy Windows applications to modem distributed applications that run in mixed operating system environments. With one of a number of available resources expressed in the form of virtual resources. Virtual resources will select a physical resources to achieve the requirement based on specified criteria. A data center is a

148441192: E-Leaming Based on Cloud Computing

facility used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems. It generally includes redundant or backup power supplies, redundant data communications connections, A growing trend in the IT world is virtualizing servers. That is, software can be installed allowing mUltiple instances of virtual servers to be used. In this way, we can have many virtual servers running on one physical server. Virtualization allows mUltiple operating systems with different virtual machines independently on the same physical machine running in parallel. Each virtual machine has its own set of virtual hardware ,it can be loaded in the hardware operating system and applications. No matter what the actual physical hardware components used, the operating system will treat them as a set of consistent, standardized hardware.

VI. Conclusion and Future Work

Cloud computing has recently emerged as a compelling paradigm for managing and delivering services over the

internet. The rise of cloud computing is rapidly changing landscape of Information technology and ultimately turning to the long-held promise of utility computing into a reality. Cloud computing can help communities and nations, can trans form education. An entire world of knowledge can no web made available to teachers and students through cloud based services that can be accessed anytime, anywhere, from any device. By helping countries worldwide, lowering the co stand simplifying the delivery of educational services, cloud computing enables students across the globe to acquire the21 st-century skills and training they need to compete and succeed in the global information society.

Through the research we believe that, we can create an elearning application model based on cloud computing by means of cloud computing's mass data storage, high-speed computing capabilities, as well as its ideal allocation and the sharing mode of resources. Some problems such as platform security, technical standards, regulatory and other services are not well resolved yet in practice, pending further research and exploration. Either way, e-Iearning application model based on cloud computing will not stop its pace to proceed. As the cloud computing technologies become more sophisticated and the applications of cloud computing become increasingly widespread, e-Iearning will certainly usher in a new era of cloud computing.

REFERENCES

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[3] Seeding the clouds: Key infrastructure elements for cloud computing, www.ibm.com

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[6] Iyer B, Henderson JC (2010). Preparing for the future: understanding the seven capabilities of cloud computing. MIS Q Exec; Vol. 9 No. 2, pp: 117-131.

[7] Mell P, Grance T (2010). The NIST defmition of cloud computing. Commun ACM; Vol. 53 No. 6, pp:50.NAONE, E ( 2007, September IS). Computer in the Cloud. Retirived 1 24, 2012, fromTechno logyReview ,MIT:

Majid Shirzad. Mehdi Ahmadipour, Ali Hoseinpanah, Hojat Rahimi

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[9] W.M. Zheng. Opportunities and Challenges to Cloud Computing. http://www.wsncs.zjut.edu.cn/downloadl20 1 0 120415 3234194. pdf, 2010.10.19

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