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Cloud Computing In Education

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 Cloud Computing In Education
Ms.Sarita Narwal, Mr. Shashi Pal Singh, Ms. Lenali Singh & Mr. Ajai Kumar
Applied Artificial Intelligence Group, C-DAC, Pune, India
[email protected], [email protected]

Abstract— It is evident that information and communication real existence resides out of this confusion. In real terms,
technologies (ICT) have transformed our lives and reshaped the Cloud Computing is all about a way to add capabilities,
nature of everyday activities. Where education plays an increase storage at runtime without any investment in
important role in which we are and what we can achieve in our hardware, training new personnel, or licensing new software
lifetime, Learning has dramatically changed over recent decades via Internet on user demand.
when technical revolution has brought different opportunities to
learn via the Internet. In Today’s era where Computer becomes In the current education system where desktop applications
one of the pillars of learning system, education system is facing are used more than blackboards, Cloud Computing can be an
challenges respective to resource availability, cost control and honored path in the Schools, Colleges, Universities and
storage handling. Cloud Computing is introduced as an alternate Educational Institutes. Where IT industry is growing
solution to overcome these challenges. rigorously to step in education system for their future users,
cloud computing provides flexibility to the usage of resources.
Cloud Computing is a rising technology in IT and Education
sector and has great potential for future. It is used to access the At present, necessity of computers is now swelling at an
resources (hardware, software) over the network via Internet extent that schools, universities are facing several challenges
wherever and whenever user need in an effective and efficient respective to hardware and software which can be overcome
manner. Where Students are looking for the electronic gadgets by cloud computing. The Challenges are;
rather than textbooks with their changing demands in this high
tech environment, the impact of Cloud Computing in Education 1) Cost: Based on Pay-Per-Use policy.
contemporary times are often called the 'information age' or the 2) Storage: Increase the storage dynamically.
'knowledge society'. It can be looked from three perspectives
including the availability of resources in the form of software, 3) Scalability: Easily upscale or downscale the resources
infrastructure and storage over the Internet based on as and when required.
requirement. It enables IT to more rapidly adjust resources to
meet fluctuating and unpredictable education demand and II. CLOUD MODELS FOR EDUCATION
provides elasticity and flexibility in all computing manner based
on Pay-Per-Use model. Both government and private schools can
use the cloud to deliver / access better computing services at India has one of the largest higher education systems in the
lower cost and thus also helps in an economic manner including world, with 25.9 million students enrolled in more than 45,000
the urban area to small rural areas. It is the boost in knowledge degree and diploma institutions in the country [3].
for both teachers and the students that are equally important.
As per the 12th Five Year Plan the overall budget requirement
This paper will address the Cloud Computing – what it is and
how it can be explore in current education system to provide projected to achieve the proposed initiatives is Rs.1, 84,740
better skills and knowledge to students so that they can utilize crore [2]. If the Education System uses the Cloud computing
these resources and find better jobs and greater opportunities in as major and centralized system for education, this will not
future. It provides an impact of Cloud computing in noblest only reduce the cost and maintenance but also results in an
pursuit of all, education where resource allocation and sharing effective and efficient way to achieve the scalability and high
purpose will fulfill in an effective manner, outlines the role of performance.
virtualization in the establishment of cloud, several attractive
benefits it can deliver in education and suggests some steps that Based on CSU research, the costs of software licensing, server
can be taken towards the security for its adoption while
hardware and staffing to support 50,000 users by using
migrating the risks.
Microsoft Exchange e-mail (the number of undergraduate e-
Keywords— Cloud Computing,Virtualization,Benefits/Merits of mail accounts at CSU) would be $9,774,000 per year [4]. The
Cloud Computing in education,Secuirty cost of Google Apps for businesses is $50 per user per year, or
with 50,000 users, $2,500,000 per year. The cost of Google
I. INTRODUCTION Apps Education Edition, however, is $0 per year [4]. Thus the
cloud computing solution results in saving source to zero cost
The term Cloud Computing is one of the next buzz words in the education sector.
in IT industry. Cloud is used as metaphor for the Internet [1]
but when “computing” adds up it to the next, it becomes
As show in Fig.1 the cloud architecture will have large storage
bigger and fuzzier. It is referred as the updated version of
utility computing, access of anything across the firewall but its and backup, with all flavor of operating system and each
Virtual machine will act as base for all cloud services 2) Platform as a Service (PaaS): provides application
interacting with different education hubs. deploying platform to allow the researchers/developers to
Following figure shows the Cloud Architecture for Education. deploy their own application without paying for the
underlying hardware and software layers.
3) Software as a Service (SaaS): It provider’s application
over the network. There is no need of installation and buying
the licensed version software. It makes the users free from the
maintenance and support.
4) Compute as a Service (CaaS): It allows accessing
virtualized servers to quickly turn computing capacity up and
down according to the requirement.
In Education system IaaS, SaaS plays an important role
where hardware and software on a high scale becomes a
challenge in Educational Institutes.
These services are most important for educational institutions
which provide space , cost effective and power utilities in an
effective manner just on demand and on pay-per-use basis.
Following Figure shows the Cloud Service Model used in
education system.

IaaS
Student (Desktop) Admin

SaaS
(Software)
Lecturer

Fig.1. Cloud Architecture for Education PaaS

A. Cloud Deployment Models (Java, .net)
For the sake of security or personal use or enlargement of Developer
computing usage there are mainly four types of deployment
Fig.2. Cloud Service Model in Education System
models which are as follows as;[5]
1) Public Cloud: Resources are common to all.
Following figure shows the Cloud Deployment Model.
2) Private Cloud: Owned or leased by an enterprise.
3) Hybrid Cloud: Combination of both Private and Public Public
cloud
4) Community Cloud: Shared but for specific community.

B. Cloud Service Models

Hybrid Cloud
The hurdles faced by the educational institutes during the
installation and purchase of license copy of software on the
computers and hardware are now replaced by the cloud
computing. They can store their data on remote machine and
can access it from anywhere via the intranet/ internet as a
service which is as follows as; [6]
Private Cloud
1) Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): provide
infrastructure as per the requirement of students, teachers,
researchers with hardware configuration includes memory, Organization
operating system, storage, network capacity globally or locally
for particular work.
Fig.3. Cloud Deployment Model
 Universities can approach private cloud for big-data There are several open source software which are helpful in
storage or access high speed on a large scale. School and the deployment of Cloud Deployment Models which are as
institutes where data requirement is low can go with public follows as; [9]
cloud. Hybrid clouds and Community cloud can be used by
developers. For Example: Panasas Hybrid [13] cloud which is  Openstack: It is used to deploy Private and Public
combination of private cloud with Amazon public cloud cloud founded by Rackspace Hosting and NASA.
storage, Virgina Virtual computing lab.  Eucalyptus: It uses the Amazon command-line tools

C. Virtualization  Cloudera: It is a Hadoop Software framework.

To provide the desktop service that comes under  OpenNebula: It is an open-source virtual
Infrastructure as Service, virtual machines will be created on infrastructure engine.
one physical machine to reduce the number of servers. Virtual
machines can be started and stopped according to the  CloudStack: It is used for deploying infrastructure
requirement on a physical machine. In such manner cloud cloud services.
computing provides much more flexibility to configure
various partitions of resources on same physical machine.
Table 1.Infrastructure as a Service Concept
In addition, [7] multiple virtual machines are able to run
parallel applications irrespective of several operating systems
on single physical machine where every virtual machine is IaaS Concept Object
completely isolated from one another on that single physical
machine. Operating System Linux
VM Agent: It keeps track of the various virtual machines that License Open Source
are currently running, sleep mode, suspend or stopped. Several
Hypervisors such as KVM (Kernel Based Virtual Machine), Software OpenStack
Xen are mainly used to manage the several virtual machines Standards Public API
on a single physical machine. It supports the sudden high peak
demand and also helps in overwriting the cores of physical DataBase MySql
machine. Hypervisor KVM has the capability to overwrite the Security Quantum Server
quotas of the physical machine so that a single physical
machine can monitor multiple virtual machines. VM Monitor KVM
Figure shows the virtualization management in Cloud. User Interface OpenStack Horizon

OS OS OS OS OS D. Benefits of Cloud Computing in Education [11,12]

Cloud computing with its capacity of scaling and elasticity has
Windows Red Hat Debian Ubuntu SUSE several benefits in education sector.
Figure shows the Benefits of Cloud in Education.

VM1 VM2 VM3 VM4 VM5

Ease of
KVM (Hypervisor) Use Pay-Per-
Economy
(Kernel Based Virtual Machine) Use
Cloud
Benefits
Data
Physical Machine (Hardware, OS (Linux)) Scalability
Portability
Resource
Fig.4. Virtualization Management in Cloud
Pooling

KVM runs concurrently multiple virtual machines running

Linux and windows images where each virtual machine has its
emulated hardware configuration including separate network Fig.5. Benefits of Cloud Computing in Education
card, disk, and graphic adapter. But keep in mind that physical
machine should have virtualization support. It is a  Ease of Use: Students can use desktop application with
virtualization infrastructure for Linux kernel originally unawareness of installation of operating system,
supported X86 and X86-64 processors.[8] software. They have just to do their work without any
 tension of resources from where they manage. exam time, academic year so that they can balance
Everything will be available on their demand. work load. Cloud service makes them realize that they
have no need to expend money on extra hardware’s,
 Storage: Where keeping data on a large scale becomes storage for a short period of time.
an issue, cloud service provides a solution to this.
Students can keep their data on cloud machine without  Pay-Per-Use: Cloud also offers Pay-Per-Use policy .To
worrying about the backup, damage of hard disk. They take the benefit of large data or resource usage
can use their data from anywhere via Internet. There is institutes have to pay only for that what they use. There
no need of extra expenditure on hard disks for storage is no need to buy physical machine for some time
purpose. usage or testing purpose. Universities, institutes,
schools can use infrastructure as a service.
 User Satisfaction: Students can use cloud service free
of cost at some extent. They can access latest tools,  Self Service: Users can decide what resources they
skills from innovative companies such as Microsoft, want to use according to their requirement on their own
Google which offers them free use of Microsoft office, irrespective of provider. Facilities are there to manage
Spreadsheets application. Students can keep this the resources.
application up-to date on their own systems.
 Economies: Universities, institutes ,schools where
 Data Portability: Data portability plays an important buying, keeping hardware on a large scale become a
role in education system. Students have to do research problem and upon this installation of software their
for their higher education in various fields where they maintenance ,licensed version becomes an issue, it can
need more data, videos, and slides from here and there. be easily solved by cloud computing services where
But just because of virus or some power-failure their they will get desktop application easily. Service
data can be destroyed. At that time they have to providers always give a discount on their services
approach admin for recovery and sometime didn’t get because they know institutes are their future users
anything in revert. Cloud computing save them from all which will also give them better employers in future.
this.
 High Availability: Software has always been providing
Table 2. Benefits of Cloud computing in education
with user demand. Rapid demands also fulfilled by the
cloud services which the users can use anytime Cloud
anywhere. Educa
tion Cloud
Cloud
 Reliability: Students can relieve from the tension of the Syste Deploy
Service Cloud Benefits
Solutions
m ment
data security, power-failure, hard-disk damage, loss of Model
Model
data. Cloud computing also act as World where they  e-learning,
can avoid keeping textbooks and use mobility to  Free of cost
access.  Resource Pooling
 Back-Up
 Time Saver: Where education sector spend lot of time Stude SaaS,
 High Storage Google Docs,
Public  Adds Mobility G-Mail,
in establishment of infrastructure may be weeks or nts PaaS
 Instant access from Yahoo,
month at a large scale, cloud service can reduce that anywhere at any time OpenShift-
time within seconds. In the education itself where  World without RedHat
competition is so much their spending time in textbooks
installation and maintenance of hardware and software
by the students does not make a sense.  Assignments
 Deliver online lectures Amazon,
 Low Power Consumption: Cloud services are provided Facult  Check Schedule IBM VCL,
to the institutes, universities, schools via internet y  Academic report G-Mail,
Private, IaaS,
irrespective of large data centers location and power (Teac  Availability of Yahoo
Public SaaS
her,Tu software
consumption. Servers in data center require cooling tor)  Great source of
system, maintenance and service optimization communication with
techniques which are a big hurdle for education students
institutes.

 Resource Pooling: Cloud offers unlimited resources in 
Data Management
Academic year record
terms of memory, storage, network, processing in order  Admission process
to fulfill the requirements of the users on their demand. Admi  Low IT staff Campus
Private, IaaS,
Students can take the benefit of these unlimited nistrat  Reduce cost of management,
Public SaaS
or Infrastructure, cooling MicrosoftLiv
resources in education environment and researchers system, power- e@edu
can do their research work freely. consumption, software
license, Security
 Scalability: Cloud offers infinite scalability to the
institutes, universities at their sudden demand during
 Cloud 6) Technologies like HTML5 allow users to work offline
Educa when internet access is intermittent.
tion Cloud
Syste Cloud
Deploy
Service Cloud Benefits
Solutions 7) The contract should be read carefully by the institutes.
m ment
Model
Model They should seek legal advices before signing on the
contract. Several issues should be examined such as initial
 Proper Hardware
Utilization term of contract, present and future costs, penalties, data
 Software availability access security; compensation should be restricted under
 Huge Information Amazon,Tryst
Resear IaaS, ack,Openstac
the contract expansion.
Private  Efficient Testing
cher SaaS k
 Pay-Per-Use
 Reliability
 Security Where data security becomes a risk to users there are
several ways as mentioned above to come out from these
 Appropriate Platform issues and risks. Where Life is full of risks then why to worry
 Pay-Per-Use about the material wealth. Go with the benefits but also should
 Work from anywhere
 High Skills Microsoft take care of the hurdles and keep in mind that every coin has
Devel Private,
 High compute services Dynamics two faces. In this modern world where users get more benefits
oper Hybrid
PaaS, CRM online, than the service providers always have a hesitation that’s why
CaaS ,Panasas
they are thinking about benefits of others more than their own
and it make them uncomfortable. But it is true that in IT
industry, end-user satisfaction is more important than rest of
other things. Education sector act as a future user for cloud
computing is a welcomed option.
III. SECURITY
In this digital world where users are getting benefits of IV. CONCLUSION
services beside that they always worry about their security.
User has a satisfaction from cloud services that security Cloud computing is growing rapidly in terms of computing
against back-up, power failure, hard-disk damage, system services, resource utilization (hardware and software) or in
crash but the data leakage or data access to the third party is other words Cloud is floating with huge data inside it with
still a question in front of them. Thus Data Security is the virtualization over the internet. It has a wide scope in
main concern. End Users think that the access from remote education sector. Where Students are looking more interested
server whose location is also not known to them, in spite of in electronic gadgets as a great source of communication,
that data is more secure if it is hosted under them. Cloud Computing will be a welcome step in their life. Instead
of keeping textbooks and heavy bags with them, they will
The more sensitive data includes exams papers, prefer a world without textbooks having much more efficient
employees’ accounts, research results, students’ academic way to store and access the lectures, assignment, research
records and much more in the institutes, universities, schools paper and virtual class etc. Let them give a chance to touch the
pays an important attention to take the data security steps. sky limits via cloud for their future development in this
Education sector should follow the various steps that come competition era.
under data security which are as follows as; [12]
1) There are several strict Data Protection laws and legal ACKNOWLEDGMENT
policy contract under which restriction of accessing data to We take the opportunity to acknowledge Applied
third party are signed between the service provider and the end Artificial Intelligence, Group (AAIG) Centre for Development
users. Law makers also started to mark the legal issues that of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) Pune for their constant
denote the privacy and data security protection. support and guidance in the research area of cloud computing.
2) Data encryption should be done against the Their sincerity, thoroughness and perseverance have been a
unauthorized access in the cloud. Data may be encrypted after constant source of inspiration for us along with special thank
the request and before delivering it into the cloud to Mr. Manish Kumar Abhishek (ACTS,C-DAC).
environment.
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