An E-Learning Ecosystem Based

on Cloud Computing Infrastructure

Bo Dong1, 2, Qinghua Zheng1, 2, Jie Yang1, 2, Haifei
Li3, Mu Qiao1

2009 Ninth IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning
Technologies











Rahul Mishra
M.Tech, 1
st
Semester
14CS17F
8097534323
mishrahul11@gmail.com
An E-learning Ecosystem Based on Cloud Computing Infrastructure: Report

National Institute of Technology Karnataka , Surathkal

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Table of Contents
Table of Contents ............................................................................................................ 2
Abstract: .................................................................................................................... 3
Problems addressed in paper ................................................................................... 3
Solutions suggested/implemented ............................................................................ 4
Pre-scheduling mechanism ................................................................................. 4
Early warning mechanism ................................................................................... 4
Self-recovering mechanism ................................................................................. 4
Evolutionary mechanism ..................................................................................... 5
Future work proposed ............................................................................................... 6
Solution to future work proposed .............................................................................. 7
Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 8
References ............................................................................................................... 9
Plan for II Research Paper Assignment: ................................................................... 9
Title ..................................................................................................................... 9
Authors ................................................................................................................ 9
Publication Details .............................................................................................. 9
























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

National Institute of Technology Karnataka , Surathkal

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Abstract:
Cloud Computing can be used as a service to provide computation and storage as a
service. E-learning is one of the fastest growing trends in the educational domain and it
requires dynamic computation and storage resources. However, the current underlying
infrastructure does not support dynamic allocation of resources and provides
satisfactory computational needs for E-learning ecosystem. Hence, an E-learning
ecosystem based on cloud computing infrastructure has been introduced by the authors
of the paper. The suggestions by the authors give an E-learning ecosystem with
efficient and stable use of resources with the help of cloud computing services and the
mechanisms suggested.



Problems addressed in paper
This paper introduces cloud computing into an e-learning ecosystem as an
infrastructure. Cloud computing infrastructure can provide stability, equilibrium, efficient
resource use, and sustainability to an e learning ecosystem.

The main contribution of this paper is to introduce Cloud computing into an e-learning
ecosystem as its infrastructure to build a sustainable and flourishing e-learning
ecosystem. The main features which this paper discusses a cloud computing
infrastructure 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)









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

National Institute of Technology Karnataka , Surathkal

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Solutions suggested/implemented
The paper introduces four mechanisms to solve the needs of an e-learning ecosystem
using 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 time
only some 20% of e-learning contents or applications are accessed by the users. These
contents are known as hotspots. More requests for resources occur just before
commencement of examinations. Pre-scheduling mechanism forecasts such access
loads of hotspots and provides the resources by performing pre-scheduling to safeguard
the performance during peak access times. This ensures the quality of service (QoS) of
the ecosystem is being maintained. Pre-scheduling mechanism can help to reduce
excessive resource replication and redundancy. Hence, it relocates the resources in
such 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 degrade
if the forecasted pre-schedule is incorrectly predicted. An early warning mechanism
should be deployed which will be triggered if the performance of the ecosystem starts
degrading. This will trigger the provision module to dynamically assign idle or standby
resources to target species which are currently under crisis. This mechanism makes the
ecosystem to deal with bursts of resource demands and optimizes the allocation of
resources.


Self-recovering mechanism
There will be large number of physical machines assigned by the cloud to handle the
ecosystem. It may happen frequently that some of them experience hardware or
software faults. It will degrade the service for the ecosystem. Additionally, some of the
species may completely crash. Self-recovering mechanism tells us to find such system
which may be faulty and replicate the species existing in them to other systems before it
completely crashes. This is done on a high priority basis. Self-recovering mechanism
makes the ecosystem more fault tolerant.
An E-learning Ecosystem Based on Cloud Computing Infrastructure: Report

National Institute of Technology Karnataka , Surathkal

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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 ecosystem
for better utilization of resources. If content has high usage then more resources are
supplied to it. On the other hand if content usage reach bottom threshold the system
revokes the support for the content and marks it as extinct. This maintains the quality of
content and improves the efficiency of resources used in e-learning ecosystem.

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

National Institute of Technology Karnataka , Surathkal

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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 IT
paradigm. [1]

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

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

If the system grows very large, resource scheduler can become a bottleneck. An
advanced implementation of resource manager should be done to handle
resources.

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


















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

National Institute of Technology Karnataka , Surathkal

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Solution to future work proposed
Cloud implemented should will avoid the usage of excessive computing and
storage resources, but more green technology standard should be maintained to
reduce costs and maintain the efficiency of resource utilization[2].

Unlike conventional web technologies, a light weight approach is available by
Web 2.0 services. Usable and convenient technologies such as
AJAX(Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), JavaScript,
XSLTIXML(ExtensibleStylesheetLanguageTransformations/ExtensibleMarkupLa
nguage), XHTML(ExtensibleHypertext Markup Language), CSS(Cascading Style
Sheet) and DocumentObjectModel, XML-RPC,REST (Representational State
Transfer), RSS ("Rich Site Summary" or "Real Simple Atom, wikis, podcast,
mashups, Syndication"), Social Bookmarking should be used in application layer
of cloud[3].

Deploy a storage manager in cloud architecture. Split data and files into chunks
of fixed or variable size. The architecture of such file system is hierarchical: data
chunks are physically stored on chunk providers; the corresponding storage
masters index the chunks through file indexes (FI). The storage master directly
interfaces with the service engine to discover the resources storing data. To
improve the storage Cloud reliability, storage masters have to be replicated. By
the data broker and service engine, external cloud can get storage service from
the 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, with
replication, autonomic etc. can be implemented [4].

Service provided by the cloud should be measured. Cloud systems automatically
control and optimize resource use by leveraging a metering capability at some
level 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 and
consumer 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]

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

National Institute of Technology Karnataka , Surathkal

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Conclusion
Traditional ecosystems are based on physical machines which are stacked leading to
under 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 of
cloud infrastructure. It realizes e-learning ecosystem which is reliable, flexible, cost-
efficient, self-regulated and QoS guaranteed. A real time configuration and utilization of
resources are provided by the implementation of cloud. The implemented cloud
infrastructure is thus reduces cost, efficient, provides disaster recovery, and promotes
evolvement or extinction of species existing in the storage.
An E-learning Ecosystem Based on Cloud Computing Infrastructure: Report

National Institute of Technology Karnataka , Surathkal

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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 International
Conference on Cloud Computing (CloudCom), Manila, 2009

[3] An Enhanced E-Learning Ecosystem Based on an Integration between Cloud
Computing 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 tutoring
systems, Hossein Movafegh Ghadirli and Maryam Rastgarpour


Plan for II Research Paper Assignment:
Plan of 2
nd
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 International
Conference