Implementing a Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure to Facilitate ICT in Education: Design and Evaluation

Introduction

The importance and prevalence of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in education is universally recognized, because of their potential to create more comprehensive educational material that ameliorates the academic development of children (Kalaš, 2010). Despite this fact, ICT introduction did not meet their initial, since 90s, expectations (Watson, 2006). Since early 2000s many national and international studies (Kozma, 2003; OECD, 2006; Pelgrum, 2001) depict the fact that there is a serious gap between the theoretical enhancement that will result by exploiting ICT in education and the actual application of ICT in a classroom.

Some of the obstacles mentioned above, are mainly technical issues related to the schools’ networking, computing and building infrastructures. In Greece for example, computers are part of a local area network and are communicating using the client – server computational model, which requires administration of all components (all the clients and the server). Due to the technological evolution and the software and hardware prerequisites of educational software, many school labs’ computers need to be replaced. Unfortunately, the goal of procuring and maintaining computer labs to satisfy the requirements was impractical due to limited resources. To make things worse, in order to achieve a 1:1 student to computer ratio more computers are needed, not to mention that the lack of technical personnel to support the ICT infrastructure impairs all the aforementioned issues (Kondilis et al., 2007). In 2006, a new computational model, the thin client model (Becta, 2004; Nieh et al., 2005), was introduced, taking advantage of the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) package (Balneaves, 2009) and the Ubuntu (http://www.ubuntu.com) operating system (O/S), aiming to replicate successful references of other countries (Braaten et al., 2002; Reinholdtsen, 2002; Carter et al., 2008). Old PCs could be reutilized and students had accepted thin client performance as well as Ubuntu’s application environment, but there were still technical issues with regards to the installation, everyday usage and administration (Kondilis et al., 2008).

The rest of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 presents the cloud computing model and its services. In Section 3 we analyze the conditions that we concluded as crucial in order to ensure the ICT exploitation in education. Explanations of how the proposed architecture conforms to the previous requirements along with the technical issues of the customization procedure and a comparison with corresponding proprietary software techniques are quoted in Section 4. The diffusion of the solution is being presented in Section 5, followed by the statistical analysis of a survey that was answered by the schools that adopted the solution, in Section 6. Section 7 discusses our future plans. Section 8 summarizes and concludes the paper.