09-02-2013, 10:17 AM
Implement of Cloud Computing for e-Leaming System
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Abstract
E-learning systems provide processes of
delivering the learning contents to learners who have different
backgrounds, interests, and locations away from a classroom in
order to maximize the effectiveness of learning. Usually, the
classical e-learning system is based on client/server
architecture thus they lack of the scalability, flexibility and
interoperability. It makes the learning resources cannot share,
and the system improvement is not easily. This paper proposes
the cloud computing architecture in the e-learning system that
the architecture separate into three layers includes
infrastructure, platform and application. This architecture
needs to design components in order to transfer the learning
resou
rces to the cloud platform. Infrastructure layer, the
learmng resources from the traditional system are transferred
to the cloud database instead of the usual DBMS. Platform
layer, a new e-learning system that consists of the CMS, AMS,
and other service components were developed. These
components were developed to be the intermediary between
cloud database and the applications. Finally, application layer,
CA T web application and WBI application were developed for
interacting with the student's client.
INTRODUCTION
The rapid growth in the Internet technology and
infrastructure has improved the way to develop and access
the applications. These applications are moving towards to
the interactive web-based development [I]. E-Iearning is the
convergence of the Internet technology and learning
processes, which currently becomes an alternative learning
method in an education. E-Iearning plays an important role
in creating a good learning environment, and also provides
processes of delivering the learning contents to learners who
have different backgrounds, interests, and locations away
from a classroom in order to maximize the effectiveness of
learning. Nowadays, many schools set up their own system
to their students for the efficiency.
PROPOSED ARCHITECTURE
In this section, the state of the problem is described.
These problems are used to design the system architecture.
The brief definition, theoretical framework, related terms,
architecture, the critical technologies for cloud computing
conducted in this paper are also introduced.
State a/the problem
Nowadays, e-Iearning is widely used on different
educational levels. There are various e-Iearning solutions
both open source and commercial. Usually, e-Iearning
systems are developed based on the client/server
architecture. On the server-side includes the web application
and database whereas the client means the web browser. The
e-Iearning system which contains the learning resources is
hosted on the web server.
Usually, the application on the web server and database
management system (DBMS) are defined to compatible
with the server operating system such as Unix, Linux,
Windows, etc. For this reason, the server operating system is
restricted to the programming language to develop the
application on the web server.
Architecture
The architecture of the e-Iearning system on the cloud
platform consists of three main layers: infrastructure layer,
platform layer, and application layer as shown in Figure 2.
The following three layers are the basic of cloud services.
Infrastructure layer is a hardware layer which is used as the
e-Iearning and software virtualization technologies to ensure
the stability and reliability of the infrastructure. Furthermore,
this layer supplies the computing and storage capacity for
the higher level.
Platform layer is a middle layer that contains the
middleware. In this study, the middle ware is Web service in
order to provide the learning resources as a service. It
consists of two modules: item classification module (ICM)
[26] and course selection module (CSM). Both modules are
utilized to access the items from the item bank and select the
appropriate learning content from the content database. It
also makes the learning resources can be sharable and
interoperable. The ICM module consists of the item
classification algorithm and decision tree, this module
access to the item bank on the cloud database, then it
generates the item-set pattern.
REsULTS AND DISCUSSION
According to the implementation components as shown in
Figure 3, the results comprise of two processes; CMS and
AMS. The CMS processes start at the student access to the
WB[ application, then the WB[ application requests the
content to CSM, and later CSM selects the best content from
content cloud database and return to WB[ to display. The
processes work properly. Likewise, The AMS processes
start at the student access to the CAT web application, then
the CAT web application requests the items to ISM, and
later [CM classifies the optimal item-set from the item bank
in cloud database and return to CAT web application to test
the student. The processes work correctly.
CONCLUSION
In this paper, the proposed architecture has developed to
overcome the limitation of the usual e-Iearning system that
all learning resources were stored on a server. In such case,
it lacked to support the interoperability, scalability and share
ability.
Applying the cloud computing architecture on the elearning
systems has many advantages. The proposed
system was based on the cloud computing architecture that
included three main layers; infrastructure layer, platfonn
layer and application layer. In infrastructure layer, this paper
proposed architecture for immigrating the learning resources
from the client/server architecture to the cloud platform,
which was the new infrastructure. All learning resources
were stored in the cloud database instead of the traditional
DBMS. In platform layer, a new e-Iearning system that
consists of the CMS and AMS were developed. The
platform comprised ICM and CSM, which were developed
to be the intennediary between cloud database and the
applications.