Sri Lanka faces many challenges when introducing new e-learning concepts to increase the opportunities for learners to continue with life-long learning. Education in Sri Lanka has a long history which dates back two millennia.
Sri Lanka’s education sector is digitally divided. To overcome the challenges the government and higher education institutes have taken steps to initiate course delivery via e-learning.
Higher education institutions in Sri Lanka have already started embracing e-learning for main stream course delivery.
However, there are many requirements such as infrastructure, training, resources and skilled personal for successful delivery.
Cloud computing technology is an emerging internet based computing for delivering computing services that are delivered as a service over a network (typically the Internet). The rapid growth of cloud computing has provided a variety of applications in education.
Sharing resources
Most e-Learning platforms are rarely shared between the public or private cloud platform and private infrastructure network, and usually need additional cost to deploy the environment.
Research has developed a new e-Learning framework based on the virtual private network and private cloud, which could help the student to easily setup and configure their own e-Learning environment at less cost for efficiently sharing resources in Sri Lankan universities.
It could solve the various challenges faced by e-Learning, and increases the availability, reliability and scalability of cloud based e-Learning systems.
In my research project, we study how cloud computing can benefit e-learning education in Sri Lanka.
The first objective of this project is to build an e-Learning infrastructure for Sri Lankan education system which will enhance the learning progression.
The second research objective includes providing a cost effective solution, scalable, and accessible environment that could be deployed in any learning institution.
It offers the flexibility to meet rapidly changing software requirements for current and future requirements for teachers and students.
Another objective is to provide an own storage space in the cloud to the students. Then students can use the cloud storage space to store their daily experiments.
The important objective is to provide flexible environment for different platforms to access the e-Learning system. And also it must support for other network domains to connect to private cloud network. It supports multiple client platforms both inside and outside the university infrastructure.
The following diagram illustrates the overall architecture of the system.
The overall architecture
The main contribution of this research is to building private cloud using open source software and combined it with e-learning system. The e-Learning system consist of three main steps, virtual machines implementation for computer science courses, backup system implementation and role based authentication system develop for user account management.
These features let for an efficient work with virtual machines.Virtual private cloud concepts are formed by dynamically configurable pools of cloud resources and connecting them to university private network with VPNs. This framework of VPN and private cloud integration provides the users with shared resource in the university environment. The e-Learning platform is also scalable and capable to interconnect with other multi-platform developed in different locations.
The development of e-Learning solution cannot ignore the cloud computing trends. There are many benefits from using the cloud computing for e-Learning systems.
The universities can open the technology infrastructures to private, public sectors for research advancements. he efficiencies of cloud computing can help universities keep place with ever growing resource requirements and energy costs.
The students expect their personal mobile devices to connect to university network for education. Faculty staff is asking for efficient access and flexibility when integrating technology into their lab classes.
Researchers need instant access to high performance computing services, without them.
The system has established a private cloud-based system for e-Learning, resource-sharing and support for education teachers and students. Private cloud platform that allows large number of distributed resources to become sharable and to be used for e-Learning. IT provides effective and scalable e-Learning services, especially suitable for educational institutions that teach computer science or similar subjects. After identifying the challenges and limitations, the research showed that Cloud Computing can overcome most of these limitations and challenges to improve the virtual e-Learning environment.
K.P.N. Jayasena
Member, Computer Society of Sri Lanka (CSSL) Lecturer, Department of Computing and Information Systems, Faculty of Applied Sciences, Sabaragamuwa University.