E-learning ecosystem with cloud computing infrastructure

8/11/2019 E-learning ecosystem with cloud computing infrastructure

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An E-Learning Ecosystem Basedon Cloud Computing Infrastructure

Bo Dong1, 2, Qinghua Zheng1, 2, Jie Yang1, 2, Haifei

Li3, Mu Qiao1

2009 Ninth IEEE International Conference on Advanced LearningTechnologies

Rahul MishraM.Tech, [email protected]
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]


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An E-learning Ecosystem Based on Cloud Computing Infrastructure: Report

National Institute of Technology Karnataka , Surathkal 2

Table of Contents

Table of Contents ............................................................................................................ 2Abstract: .................................................................................................................... 3Problems addressed in paper ................................................................................... 3

Solutions suggested/implemented ............................................................................ 4Pre-scheduling mechanism ................................................................................. 4Early warning mechanism ................................................................................... 4Self-recovering mechanism ................................................................................. 4Evolutionary mechanism ..................................................................................... 5

Future work proposed ............................................................................................... 6Solution to future work proposed .............................................................................. 7Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 8References ............................................................................................................... 9Plan for II Research Paper Assignment: ................................................................... 9

Title ..................................................................................................................... 9

Authors ................................................................................................................ 9Publication Details .............................................................................................. 9


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Abstract:

Cloud Computing can be used as a service to provide computation and storage as aservice. E-learning is one of the fastest growing trends in the educational domain and itrequires dynamic computation and storage resources. However, the current underlying

infrastructure does not support dynamic allocation of resources and providessatisfactory computational needs for E-learning ecosystem. Hence, an E-learningecosystem based on cloud computing infrastructure has been introduced by the authorsof the paper. The suggestions by the authors give an E-learning ecosystem withefficient and stable use of resources with the help of cloud computing services and themechanisms suggested.

Problems addressed in paper

This paper introduces cloud computing into an e-learning ecosystem as aninfrastructure. Cloud computing infrastructure can provide stability, equilibrium, efficientresource use, and sustainability to an e learning ecosystem.

The main contribution of this paper is to introduce Cloud computing into an e-learningecosystem as its infrastructure to build a sustainable and flourishing e-learningecosystem. The main features which this paper discusses a cloud computinginfrastructure can provide to an e-learning infrastructure is as follows:

1. Tracking of resource utilization

2. Configuration of resources in real time

3. Relocation of resources on demand and to make efficient use of resources.

4. Recovery from unavoidable hardware or software faults.

5. Promote the evolvement or extinction of learning species(learning contents,

services and applications)


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Solutions suggested/implemented

The paper introduces four mechanisms to solve the needs of an e-learning ecosystemusing a cloud computing infrastructure:

Pre-scheduling mechanism

Early warning mechanism

Self-recovering mechanism

Evolutionary mechanism

The details of the solutions or mechanisms provided are as follows:

Pre-scheduling mechanism

E-learning ecosystem follows some general observed rules such as; 80% of the timeonly some 20% of e-learning contents or applications are accessed by the users. Thesecontents are known as hotspots. More requests for resources occur just beforecommencement of examinations. Pre-scheduling mechanism forecasts such accessloads of hotspots and provides the resources by performing pre-scheduling to safeguardthe performance during peak access times. This ensures the quality of service (QoS) ofthe ecosystem is being maintained. Pre-scheduling mechanism can help to reduceexcessive resource replication and redundancy. Hence, it relocates the resources insuch a way that efficiency and QoS is maintained.

Early warning mechanism

Health of certain species (contents or applications) may get worsened by use of pre-scheduling mechanism. The average response time of overall ecosystem may degradeif the forecasted pre-schedule is incorrectly predicted. An early warning mechanismshould be deployed which will be triggered if the performance of the ecosystem startsdegrading. This will trigger the provision module to dynamically assign idle or standbyresources to target species which are currently under crisis. This mechanism makes theecosystem to deal with bursts of resource demands and optimizes the allocation ofresources.

Self-recovering mechanism

There will be large number of physical machines assigned by the cloud to handle theecosystem. It may happen frequently that some of them experience hardware orsoftware faults. It will degrade the service for the ecosystem. Additionally, some of thespecies may completely crash. Self-recovering mechanism tells us to find such systemwhich may be faulty and replicate the species existing in them to other systems before itcompletely crashes. This is done on a high priority basis. Self-recovering mechanismmakes the ecosystem more fault tolerant.


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Evolutionary mechanism

The number of visits of contents by users is monitored by the evolutionary mechanism.This is used for evolvement or extinction of the resources by the e-learning ecosystemfor better utilization of resources. If content has high usage then more resources aresupplied to it. On the other hand if content usage reach bottom threshold the systemrevokes the support for the content and marks it as extinct. This maintains the quality ofcontent and improves the efficiency of resources used in e-learning ecosystem.


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Future work proposed

Monitoring module needs to be extended to support efficient Quality of Service(QoS) monitoring to optimize infrastructure usability in terms of green ITparadigm. [1]

Technologies should be used that reuses user generated content, initiate socialinteraction and enable collaborative functionalities. It should facilitate thesubscription, access, propagation; reuse and compilation of small chunks ofcontent (micro content), interactive information sharing with the group membersand/or with other learner groups, primarily it should be user-centered design.

Storage manager should be implemented in the system for efficient managementof contents and application.

If the system grows very large, resource scheduler can become a bottleneck. Anadvanced implementation of resource manager should be done to handleresources.

Although it is an educational learning ecosystem, all the contents cannot beprovided without incurring any cost to end users. In long term, investment incloud components can turn out to be huge to handle enormous amount ofcomputation and data.


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Solution to future work proposed

Cloud implemented should will avoid the usage of excessive computing andstorage resources, but more green technology standard should be maintained toreduce costs and maintain the efficiency of resource utilization[2].

Unlike conventional web technologies, a light weight approach is available byWeb 2.0 services. Usable and convenient technologies such as

AJAX(Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), JavaScript,XSLTIXML(ExtensibleStylesheetLanguageTransformations/ExtensibleMarkupLanguage), XHTML(ExtensibleHypertext Markup Language), CSS(Cascading StyleSheet) and DocumentObjectModel, XML-RPC,REST (Representational StateTransfer), RSS ("Rich Site Summary" or "Real Simple Atom, wikis, podcast,mashups, Syndication"), Social Bookmarking should be used in application layerof cloud[3].

Deploy a storage manager in cloud architecture. Split data and files into chunksof fixed or variable size. The architecture of such file system is hierarchical: datachunks are physically stored on chunk providers; the corresponding storagemasters index the chunks through file indexes (FI). The storage master directlyinterfaces with the service engine to discover the resources storing data. Toimprove the storage Cloud reliability, storage masters have to be replicated. Bythe data broker and service engine, external cloud can get storage service fromthe e-Education Cloud.[4]

If the system grows very complex, further mechanisms and resources should be

allocated to resource manager. It should be used to avoid the congestion.Decentralized and distributed scheduling algorithms such as hierarchical, withreplication, autonomic etc. can be implemented [4].

Service provided by the cloud should be measured. Cloud systems automaticallycontrol and optimize resource use by leveraging a metering capability at somelevel of abstraction appropriate to the type of service (e.g., storage, processing,bandwidth, and active user accounts). Resource usage can be monitored,controlled, and reported, providing transparency for both the provider andconsumer of the utilized service[5]. This measuring capability could also be used

to incur cost from the user based on pay per use model.[5]


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Conclusion

Traditional ecosystems are based on physical machines which are stacked leading tounder or over utilization of resources. Most of the resources are deployed to perform

only specific tasks.

With the increasing demand of E-learning ecosystem this paper introduces using ofcloud infrastructure. It realizes e-learning ecosystem which is reliable, flexible, cost-efficient, self-regulated and QoS guaranteed. A real time configuration and utilization ofresources are provided by the implementation of cloud. The implemented cloudinfrastructure is thus reduces cost, efficient, provides disaster recovery, and promotesevolvement or extinction of species existing in the storage.


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References

[1] Private Cloud for collaboration and e-Learning ecosystem from IaaS to SaaS ,Computing(2011), Frank Doemlitzscher, Anthony Sulistio, Christoph Reich, Hendrick

Kuijs David Wolf

[2] M. Ali, Green cloud on the horizon, in Proceedings of the 1st InternationalConference on Cloud Computing (CloudCom), Manila, 2009

[3] An Enhanced E-Learning Ecosystem Based on an Integration between CloudComputing and Web2.0, Shima Ouf, Mona Nasr, Yehia Helmy

[4] Study on an interoperable cloud framework for e-Education, E -Business and E -Government (ICEE), 2011 International Conference, Yang, Zhihe

[5] A Paradigm for the application of cloud computing in mobile intelligent tutoringsystems, Hossein Movafegh Ghadirli and Maryam Rastgarpour

Plan for II Research Paper Assignment:

Plan of 2nd

Research Paper assignment: New Research Paper Analysis

Title

MELA: Monitoring and Analyzing Elasticity of Cloud Services

Authors

Daniel Maldovan

Georgiana Copil

Hang-Linh Truong

Schahram Dustdar

Publication Details

Cloud Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom), 2013 IEEE 5th InternationalConference

Documents

E-learning ecosystem with cloud computing infrastructure