Model of E-Education Infrastructure based on Cloud Computing

Theoretical Background

Talking about application of cloud computing infrastructure in higher education, three basic approaches can be noticed. First approach is complete outsourcing of e-education infrastructure (Sultan, 2010) which educational institutions provide to their users (teaching staff, administrative staff, researchers, students, etc.) with services such as e-mail, digital libraries, etc., through the leased infrastructure of a cloud provider. Second approach is cloud within the private infrastructure (Caron, Desprez, Loureiro, & Muresan, 2009) that requires highly skilled cloud administrators and appropriate hardware and software resources within the educational institution. Third approach represents combination of previous two approaches (Costanzo, Assuncao, & Buyya, 2009). The educational institution can develop and deploy its own cloud infrastructure. If the infrastructure becomes overloaded, a third party cloud services can be leased in the periods of increased demand.

In the previous years, there has been much research in the field of cloud computing. However, only a few dealt with the problem of developing and deploying models for e-learning infrastructure using cloud computing. Main research directions important for the problems considered in this chapter include: identity management within cloud computing environment, modelling the cloud computing infrastructure, analyzing performances of the cloud computing, and resource management in e-learning systems.