Cloud Computing for Education and Learning: Education and Learning as a Service (ELaaS)

Mohssen M. Alabbadi
Computer Research Institute (CRI) King Abdulaziz City for Science & Technology (KACST) Riyadh, Saudi Arabia Alabbadi@kacst.edu.sa
AbstractCloud computing, despite its hype, is being widely deployed, with its dynamic scalability and usage of virtualized resources, in many organizations for several applications. It is envisioned that, in the near future, cloud computing will have a significant impact on the educational and learning environment, enabling their own users (i.e., learners, instructors, and administrators) to perform their tasks effectively with less cost by utilizing the available cloud-based applications offered by the cloud service providers. This paper discusses the use of cloud computing in the educational and learning arena, to be called Education and Learning as a Service (ELaaS), emphasizing its possible benefits and offerings. It is essential for an educational and learning organization, with its budget restrictions and sustainability challenges, to use the cloud formation best suited for a particular IT activity. The Jericho Forum proposes a cloud computing formation model, called the Cloud Cube Model (CCM), which is based on 4 criteria. To preserve the symmetry of the cube, a new cloud computing formation model, called the Complete Cloud Computing Formations (C3F), is proposed. The IT activities in the educational and learning organizations are then classified with respect to the two criteria: mission criticality and sensitivity. Each class is then mapped into the appropriate position in the C3F, creating ELaaS Quadrant. This essentially establishes a general conceptual framework for ELaaS. Keywords- Cloud Computing; Cloud Computing Formations; Education and Learning as a Service (ELaaS); Grid Computing; Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in Education; Virtualization; Web Services; Utility Computing

Utility Computing: It refers to the packaging and provisioning of computing resources in the form of metered service with some pricing scheme, thus with virtualization, IT resources can be provisioned as an on-demand service available on a subscription basis1 [14]; Web Services: Web services, in particular those based on the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) which is an XML-based open source message transport protocol, allows software delivery, where pieces of the software can be developed and then published on a registry to be dynamically discovered and consumed by other client applications over different transport protocols (e.g., HTTP, TCP/IP, etc.) irrespective of the programming language and platform. Web services have created the foundation for the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm and, most importantly, SOAP-based Web services are now being used in the delivery of some aspects of cloud computing which not only deliver software remotely but also other ITrelated functionality [20].

I.

INTRODUCTION

Cloud computing is an emerging Internet-based computing paradigm, with its built-in elasticity and scalability, for delivering on-demand information technology (IT) services to users in a pay-per-use basis, in similar fashion as already done for other utilities (i.e., water, electricity, etc.). It is a confluence of business developments and the following existing IT technologies: x Virtualization: It enables the creation of a virtual (as opposed to actual) version of an IT resource (e.g., an operating system, a server, a storage device, or network). This allows data center consolidation and provides separation and protection; Grid Computing: It enables the execution of tasks over multiple computers dispersed over geographical areas, forming a seemingly supercomputer capability;

Three trends have contributed to the emergence of cloud computing: the Internet and its technologies, in particular, World Wide Web (WWW) and Web 2.0 functionality; the catch up of telecommunications with hardware and software, where open standards were leveraged, resulting in low cost of broadband and wide availability of accessible high-speed wireless networks; and the falling cost of storage and computing devices, first led by mainframes and minicomputers then PCs, and, more recently, by Internet-enabled handheld mobile devices. All these technologies and trends made computing more distinctively distributed, thus migrating back to huge data centers. Networks of these computing plants, called IT factories [1], with commercial realization, form cloud computing [7]. Cloud computing provides users a power of choice among less expensive (or free) competing services that are user-friendly, accessible from any location, and more reliable [1]. It marks the reversal of a long-standing trend, where end users and organizations are now willing to surrender
1

The provision of software programs and applications to users as a service via the Internet by application service providers (ASPs) during the 1990s could not succeed because of insufficient bandwidth [20] and importability due to the use of proprietary technologies.

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a large measure of control to 3rd-party service providers [8] to gain several advantages such as redirecting resources, focusing on long-term strategic business development, and business continuity [15]. When compared to the existed traditional IT services provisioning models, cloud computing has many advantages such as reduced upfront investment (i.e., software, hardware, and professional staff to maintain servers and upgrade software [15]), reduced launching time, where days become hours [15], expected performance, high availability, infinite scalability, tremendous fault-tolerance capability [22], and enhanced collaboration, accessibility, and mobility, allowing users to use any device, such as a personal computer (PC), or a mobile phone, etc. [8]. Therefore, the use of cloud computing will have a profound positive impact on the cost structure of all the industries using IT resources by lowering the total cost of ownership (TCO) [8], resulting in an indirect crucial impact on business creation and the macroeconomic performance at national levels [6], extending to a global level. This benefits the private as well as the public sectors, including healthcare, education (especially for e-learning) [5], and the activities of government agencies. In both academia and industry, cloud computing has been recently attracting significant momentum and attention as one of those opportunities that could prove to be of immense benefits and empowering in some situations, due to its flexibility and pay-per-use cost structure, for organizations. In the educational and learning arena, this will be called Education and Learning as a Service (ELaaS). Cloud computing was in the list of the top 10 strategic technologies and trends identified by Gartner, the US analyst firm, consecutively in the previous years. In 2008, it was listed as Web Platform & Web Oriented Architecture (WOA) due to the success of Software as a Service (SaaS) model and it then became pronounced as cloud computing in the years 2009 through 20112. The Horizon reports, resulted from collaboration between the New Media Consortium (NMC) and EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), a program of the influential EDUCAUSE, a non-for-profit US organization, aim to provide an educational-orientated perspective on expected key emerging technologies for higher education as well as K-12 education published as separate reports by identifying the emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, research, or creative expression within learning-focused organizations. The higher education and K-12 editions do not differ in terms of the technologies featured but in terms of the adoption Horizons because K-12 education lags behind higher education in using IT technologies. Cloud computing was placed as a unifying technology supporting other emerging technologies in the year 2008 [11]. Then it
See Gartner, Inc., Press Releases, Gartner Newsroom, Retrieved online, on Aug. 30, 2011, at http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=530109 (for the year 2008), http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=777212 (for the year 2009), http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1210613 (for the year 2010), and finally http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1454221, (for the year 2011).
2

appeared as an emerging technology to be adopted in 1-2 years for 2009 [11] and 2010 [12] but it gained the power of a key trend in 2011 [13]. IDC, a US market research firm, estimated the IT spending on cloud computing services to reach US$42 billion by 2012 [15]. There are several successful deployments of cloud computing within educational and learning organizations, utilizing both commercial and non-commercial cloud computing solutions [9,14,18,19,21]. However, there are several cloud formations (i.e., forms of cloud computing) and it is essential for an educational and learning organization, with its budget restrictions and sustainability challenges, to use the cloud formations best suited to its IT activities. The Jericho 3 Forum [10] has established a cloud computing formation model, called the Cloud Cube Model (CCM) which is based on 4 criteria (i.e., dimensions) [10]. The use of a cube, a 3-dimensional object, to represent the 4 criteria eliminates the symmetry inherited in the cube. Thus a new cloud computing formation model, called the Complete Cloud Computing Formations Model (C3F), is proposed. The IT activities in the educational and learning organizations are then classified with respect to the two criteria: mission criticality and sensitivity. Each class of the IT activities is then mapped into the appropriate position in the C3F, thus creating ELaaS. This essentially establishes a general conceptual framework for adopting and deploying ELaaS. The structure of the rest of the paper is as follows. Section II properly defines cloud computing. C3F is explained in details in Section III. The classification of the IT activities in educational and learning organizations is discussed in Section IV. Section V shows the mapping of these IT activities into C3F, creating ELaaS. Finally, the concluding remarks are given in Section VI. II. CLOUD COMPUTING

Cloud computing is a nascent business and highly disruptive technology concept with different meanings for different IT professionals. For application and IT users, it is IT as a service (ITaaS), delivering computing, storage, and applications over the Internet from centralized data centers, and for Internet application developers, it is an Internet-scale software development platform and runtime environment, whereas for infrastructure providers and administrators, it is massive, distributed data center infrastructure connected by IP networks [15]. These different views are clearly reflected in the views of cloud computing for some providers such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google [2]. Furthermore, the abstracted definition of cloud computing [19] does not distinguish it from other paradigms such as grid computing; this abstracted view can be used for comparing cloud computing with other
3

Jericho (called r, in Arabic, meaning fragrant, driven from the word Reah and called yrio in Hebrew) is a city located near the Jordan River in the West Bank of the Palestinian territories. It is situated well below sea level north of the Dead Sea, thus it is the lowest permanently inhabited site on earth. It is also believed to be the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world (Wikipedia, Jericho, May 21, 2011, Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., San Francisco, CA, USA, Retrieved, online. on Aug 30, 2011, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jericho).

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computing paradigms as done in [17] when cloud computing was compared, based on computer architecture model, with service computing and pervasive computing. The disparity of cloud computing definition is even extended to organizations such as EDUCAUSE, which views cloud computing as the delivery of scalable IT resources over the Internet, as opposed to hosting and operating those resources locally, such as on a college or university network [4]; this definition clearly lacks the service concept and pay-per-use aspect of cloud computing. Unfortunately, there is abundance of definitions for cloud computing in the literature, with hype and divergent viewpoints, leading to a non-standard definition; the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) confirm the confusion about the terms cloud and cloud computing [1]. In this paper, the U.S National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) definition is adopted. NIST defines cloud computing as a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model promotes availability and is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models [16]. The five essential characteristics are [16]: on-demand selfservice, where a consumer can unilaterally provision computing capabilities as needed automatically without requiring human interaction from each service's provider; broad network access, where the capabilities are available over the network and accessed through standard mechanisms, promoting the use of heterogeneous thick or thin client platforms such as mobile phones, laptops, and PDAs; resource pooling, where the provider's computing resources are pooled to serve multiple consumers using a multi-tenant model, with different physical and virtual resources dynamically assigned and reassigned according to consumers demands; rapid elasticity, where the capabilities can be rapidly and elastically provisioned, in some cases automatically, to quickly scale out, and rapidly released to quickly scale in; and measured service, where the cloud service providers automatically control and optimize resource use by leveraging a metering capability at some level of abstraction appropriate to the type of service. There are three service models of cloud computing, where in all models the consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure including network, servers, operating systems, storage, or applications. The three service models are Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) [16]. With IaaS, the consumer, based on demands, can provision processing, storage, networks, and other computing resources, such that the consumer is able to deploy, run, and control arbitrary software, including operating systems and applications, with possibly limited control of select networking components (e.g., host firewalls) [16]. By virtualization, hardware level resources are abstracted and encapsulated, providing a flexible infrastructure of distributed data center services, where the end user can access the services through a

standardized interface, connected via Internet-style networking. Examples of IaaS are Amazon EC2 and S3. With PaaS, the consumer can deploy onto the cloud infrastructure consumer-created or acquired applications created using programming languages and tools supported by the cloud provider, such that the consumer has control over the deployed applications and possibly application hosting environment configurations [16]. It is the middleware providing application services and/or runtime environment for cloud applications, layering between IaaS and SaaS. It includes operating system support and software development frameworks to provide a platform for developers to develop, test, and deploy Web-scale applications and services. Google APP Engine and Microsoft Azure are examples of PaaS. On the other hand, with SaaS, the providers software applications are accessible by the consumer from various client devices through a thin client interface such as a web browser, where the consumer may possibly have control over limited user-specific application configuration settings. SaaS is simply top-layer applications delivered on demand. SaaS is the most visible layer of cloud computing for end users. A well known example for SaaS offerings is Salesforce.com. There are four deployment models for cloud computing: private cloud, community cloud, public cloud, and hybrid cloud [16]. When the cloud infrastructure is owned solely for an organization, providing hosted services to a limited number of people behind a firewall, it is called a private cloud; it also called an internal cloud or a corporate cloud. But when the cloud infrastructure is shared by several organizations, supporting a specific community that has shared concerns (e.g., security requirements or compliance considerations), then it is called community cloud. Both the private and community clouds may be managed by the organizations or a 3rd-party and may exist on premise or off premise. On the other hand, public cloud makes its cloud infrastructure available to the general public or a large group and is owned by the organization selling the cloud services; it is also called external cloud. Hybrid cloud is a composition of two or more cloud models (private, community, or public) that remain unique entities but are bound together by standardized or proprietary technology, enabling data and application portability. Cloud computing faces five major challenges that need to be addressed: security, interoperability, availability, performance, and data migration. Security is concerned about data privacy, confidentiality, and network traffic isolation through partitioning, whereas interoperability must support customer choice and additional agility (for example, in workload mobility). Service level agreement (SLA) should address performance, availability, latency, and QoS (quality-ofservice) issues. On the other hand, the problem of migrating data between clouds, both public and private, is probably the biggest challenge [15]. III. COMPLETE CLOUD COMPUTING FORMATIONS (C3F)

There are several cloud formations (i.e., forms of cloud computing), where each form offers different characteristics with varying degrees of flexibility, collaborative opportunities, and risks [10]. The Jericho Forum [10] proposes a cloud

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computing formation model, called the Cloud Cube Model (CCM), shown in Fig.1. The CCM is based on 4 criteria (i.e., dimensions) to differentiate cloud formations from each other and the manner of their provision. The CCM uses 4 faces of the cube, as shown in Fig. 1, with two faces left blanks, representing no criterion (i.e., empty faces). This eliminates the symmetry of the cube and it may introduce confusion, when categorizing the cloud services as done in [3].

Figure 1. The Cloud Cube Model (CCM) from the Jericho Forum [10]

To preserve the use of a cube with its symmetry, where every pair of opposite faces represents the same criterion, the number of criteria needs to be reduced to three. The reduction is simply done by combing two criteria of the original CCM into one, resulting in a new cloud computing model, to be called the Complete Cloud Computing Formation (C3F). As in CCM, other attributes like offshore and onshore, even though they are relevant, are not considered. The C3F is depicted in Fig. 2 and its three dimensions are as explained in details below. I. Physical Location and Management: This deals with the physical location of the cloud infrastructure with respect to the organizations boundaries and who is managing the delivery of the cloud service(s) used by the organization. The management is primarily a policy issue (i.e. a business decision, not a technical or architectural decision) which must be embodied in a contract with the cloud provider. Thus, the following types result: x Internal/In-sourced (Int/In): It is within the organization's physical boundary (i.e., Internal) under the control of the organization's own staff (In-sourced). x Internal/Outsourced (Int/Out): It is within the organization's physical boundary (i.e., Internal) under the control of a 3rd-party (Outsourced). x External/Outsourced (Ext/Out): It is not within organization's physical boundary (External) under the control of a 3rd-party (Outsourced). Most likely, the owner of the cloud infrastructure is controlling it as well, as in the case of public cloud. The case for External/In-sourced form is not practical with the present technology. This is like a public cloud provider giving control of its infrastructure and services to its customers.

II. Ownership: It defines the ownership of the cloud technology, services, interfaces, etc. It indicates the degree of interoperability to enable data/application transportability between the organization's systems and other cloud forms, and the ability to withdraw the organization's data and/or application from a cloud form or to move or share them to another organization without constraint. x Proprietary (P): The cloud service provider is keeping the means of provision under its ownership. Consequently, when operating in clouds that are proprietary, moving data and/or applications to another cloud provider(s) may require significant effort or investment. x Open (O): Open clouds are using technology that is not proprietary. The organization is not constrained to share its data and collaborate with selected parties using the same open technology. III. Architectural Mindset: In the original CCM, this criterion defines whether the traditional IT perimeters such as network and firewall are operating inside, called Perimeterised (Per), or outside, called De-perimeterised (D-p), the organization. On the other hand, this criterion was modified in [3] and this modification is adopted in C3F, resulting the following types. x Perimeterised (Per): Perimeterised means infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS), or any services, contracts, and supports using infrastructure and platform. x De-perimeterised (De-p): De-perimeterised stands for Software as a Service (SaaS), or any services, contracts, or supports for software/application, since they are restricted by hardware boundary.

Figure 2. The Complete Cloud Computing Formation (C3F)

Since the three criteria are mutually exclusive, then there are 3*2*2= 12 forms. Furthermore, each form is to be represented as a 3-tuple element with the following attributes: (Physical Location and Management, Technology Ownership, Architectural Mindset). For example, (Int/Out, O, De-p) is a 3tuple designating internal /outsourced, open, De-perimeterised form.

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IV.

IT ACTIVITIES IN THE EDUCATIONAL AND LEARNING

ORGANIZATIONS

Cloud computing can deliver great advantage to an educational and learning organization, with its budget restrictions and sustainability challenges, but only if the organization uses the cloud formation best suited for a particular activity [10]. This necessitates the classification of IT activities in these organizations with respect to some scheme. It is crucial to select the classification criteria that suit the educational and learning environment. Two principles will govern the selection of the classification criteria. First, it is evident that commercial cloud service providers are gaining significant economies of scale in their infrastructure and service-delivery capacities, enabling them to provide enhanced and mature services, when compared to an individual educational and learning organization, no matter how large and complex the organization is. This is an outward principle, leading to the adoption of cloud computing. This makes it evident that cost is not to be considered as a criterion for classification, at least in the long term planning. Furthermore, for educational and learning organizations, the benefits of moving some of the IT services into the cloud may outweigh the risks associated with respect the challenges facing cloud computing. Second, commercial cloud service providers do not sufficiently understand the educational and learning business requirements, at least from the point of view of the educational and learning organizations. This is an inward principle, limiting the use of cloud computing to the non-core organizational services. The two principles are balanced, creating a neutral view for adopting cloud computing.
TABLE I. EXAMPLES OF IT ACTIVITIES IN THE EDUCATIONAL AND
LEARNING ORGANIZATION

concerned about privacy, security, data integrity, intellectual property management, audit trails, and other issues. For simplicity, both criteria are categorized as Low and High. Table 1 gives some examples of IT activities in the educational and learning organization for each category. Both criteria can be fine grained to suit the organization environment. The examples of IT services given in Table 1 are not meant to be exhaustive but they are typical IT activities in the educational and learning environment. Each educational and learning should classify their IT services as done in Table 1. The classifications of services provided in the table 1 are representative and the services may be classified differently, depending on the other factors such as national compliance regulations and laws, organizational requirements, etc. V. CLOUD COMPUTING IN EDUCATION AND LEARNING

A. Education and Learning asa Service (ELaaS) Each category of the IT activities is then mapped into the appropriate position of in the C3F, as depicted in Fig. 3. The mapping creates Education and Learning as a Service (ELaaS) and the resulted quadrant is to be called ELaaS Quadrant. This establishes a general conceptual framework for ELaaS ELaaS is symphonious with other cloud terms (e.g., IaaS, SaaS), emphasizing the service concept. However, it is clear from the figure that ELaaS is a hybrid approach, including cloud and non-cloud based solutions. Some IT activities in the educational and learning environment may be best implemented and operated using a traditional non-cloud based system.

Sensitivity

Mission Criticality
Low High

High

x Sensitive Research Activities x Student Email

x x x x x

Students Records Staff Records Faculty Records Medical Records Administrative (Finance, Purchasing, etc.) x Backup of Sensitive Information Faculty & Staff Email E-learning Mobile learning Backup of Nonsensitive Information

Low

x Alumni Email x Student Projects x Websites for Faculty, Students, Staff, and Classes x News & Announcements x Non-sensitive Research Activities

x x x x

Figure 3. Mapping the ITactivities into C3F: ELaaS Quadrant

Equipped with above two principles, the two classification criteria are: mission criticality and sensitivity. Mission criticality parameterizes the relation of the activity to the core services of the organization, whereas sensitivity measures the impact of the activity on the organization, an individual, or group of individuals in the organization. Sensitivity is

B. Step Forward The right-hand quadrants in the ELaaS Quadrant show that (Int/In, *, **) and (Int/Out, *, **), where * and ** indicate either Open (O) or Proprietary (P) and either Perimeterised or De-perimeterised, respectively, are very strong candidate approaches. This suggests that an educational and learning organization can take a step forward by establishing its owned cloud computing infrastructure. This enables the organization to be a cloud computing service provider for its own IT needs as well as other educational and learning organizations.

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VI.

CONCLUSION

It is essential for an educational and learning organization, with its budget restrictions and sustainability challenges, to use the cloud formations best suited to its IT activities. A cloud computing formation model, called the Complete Cloud Computing Formation Model (C3F), is proposed. It is based on the Cloud Cube Model (CCM) developed by the Jericho Forum. The IT activities in the educational and learning organizations are then classified with respect to the two criteria: mission criticality and sensitivity. Both criteria are categorized as Low and High. Each category of the IT activities is then mapped into the appropriate position of in the C3F. The mapping creates Education and Learning as a Service (ELaaS) and the resulted quadrant is to be called ELaaS Quadrant; ELaaS is a hybrid approach, including cloud and non-cloud based solutions. Essentially, this establishes a general conceptual framework for ELaaS REFERENCES
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