Design of Cloud-based E-learning System for Virtual Classroom

Cloud computing provides a great collection of computing resources that can be rapidly and elastically provisioned and released based on users‘ demand to serve a wide and regularly expanding variety of information processing requirements. Due to its tremendous advantages this technology is maturing quickly and is being adopted in many applications including government, business, and education. This research employs the Cloud as a learning environment for teaching Computer Science and related courses by removing the locality constraints, while simultaneously improving students ’understanding of the material provided through practical experience with the finer details and subjects‘ complexities.

Most of the universities infrastructures are underutilized and in some cases over utilization of resources occurs, in order to balance the usage of the resources there is need for an elastic technology. In order to develop an e-Learning platform for virtual or open distance learning (ODL) undergraduate students of computer science new methodologies (like cloud based e-Learning) should be taken into consideration for project, problem based learning and virtual computorium. The research identified several potential Computer Science courses which could be launched and taught through Clouds. This framework addresses the services of cloud computing in a new dimension and each layer (in virtual classroom cloud-based system) specifies the essential components (that is matching of computer science courses with cloud layers) needed to construct an academic cloud in an open distance learning environment. And finally, a way of implementing the framework is proposed.