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Cloud Computing for Higher Education: A Roadmap

Conference Paper · May 2012

DOI: 10.1109/CSCWD.2012.6221872

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 Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE 16th International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design
Cloud Computing for Higher Education: A Roadmap
MD. Anwar Hossain Masud
School of Computing and Mathematics
Charles Sturt University
Albury, NSW 2640, Australia
manwarhossain@csu.edu.au
Jianming Yong
School of Information Systems
University of Southern Queensland
Queensland, Australia
jianming.yong@usq.edu.au
Abstract--Advances in technology offers new opportunities in
enhancing teaching and learning. The new technologies enable
individuals to personalize the environment in which they work
or learn, a range of tools to meet their interests and needs. In
this paper, we try to explore the salient features of the nature
and educational potential of ‘cloud computing’ (CC) in order
to exploit the affordance of CC in teaching and learning in a
higher education context. It is evident that cloud computing
has a significant place in the higher education landscape both
as a ubiquitous computing tool and a powerful platform.
Although, the adoption of cloud computing promises various
benefits to an organization, a successful adoption of cloud
computing in an organization, particularly in educational
institutes requires an understanding of different dynamics and
expertise in diverse domains. This paper aims at a roadmap of
Cloud Computing for Higher Education (CCHE) which
provides with a number of steps for adopting cloud computing.
Keywords: Cloud computing, Migration, Roadmap
I. INTRODUCTION
Higher education (HE) landscape around the world is in a
constant state of flux and evolution, mainly as a result of
significant challenges arising from efforts in adopting new
and emerging technologies. This is mainly as a result of a
new genre of students with learning needs vastly different
from their predecessors, and it is increasingly recognized that
using technology effectively in higher education is essential
to providing high quality education and preparing students
for the challenges of the 21st century. Although the new
technologies have the potential to play an important role in
the development and emergence of education system, where
control can shift from the teacher to an increasingly more
autonomous learner, and to rescue the HE from this appalling
situation, the change is very slow or not forthcoming at all
for various reasons. It is becoming clear to many people,
including students, that traditional methods are unable to
address the needs of HE where the emphasis is on higher
order learning experiences and outcomes demanded of a
changing knowledge- and communication-based society [1].
It is hoped that this need can be effectively facilitated by
978-1-4673-1210-3/12/$31.00 ©2012 IEEE
Xiaodi Huang
School of Computing and Mathematics
Charles Sturt University
Albury, NSW 2640, Australia
xhuang@csu.edu.au
adopting the benefits of cloud computing through innovative
research approaches.
The concept of “computing in the cloud” is about the
delivery of IT services that run in a web browser; the type of
services ranges from adaptations of familiar tools such as
email and personal finance to new offerings such as virtual
worlds and social networks. Storage of digital data is an
important service among these. Cloud computing is a
computing platform that resides in a service provider’s large
data centre[2] and is able to dynamically provide servers the
ability to address a wide range of needs of clients[3]. The
cloud is a metaphor for the internet. Some people call it the
World Wide Computer. Technically, it is a computing
paradigm in which tasks are assigned to a combination of
connections, software and services accessed over a network
[4]. This network of servers and connections is collectively
known as the cloud. Computing at the scale [5][6] of the
cloud allows users to access supercomputer-level power.
Instead of operating their own data centers, firms might rent
computing power and storage capacity from a service
provider, paying only for what they use, as they do with
electricity or water. This paradigm has also been referred to
as “utility computing,” in which computing capacity is
treated like any other metered utility service—one pays only
for what one uses [7].
The typical uses of cloud computing to academics are:
• It can be used as a personal workspace;
• A convenient tool to make teaching and learning
interactive- has strong potential for social
interactivity;
• Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) used by
many people as an alternative to institutionally
controlled Virtual Learning Environments
(VLEs)/LMS with different personalized tools to
meet their own personal needs and preferences; as
teachers we are always learning;
• Provides opportunity for ubiquitous computing;
552
 • No need for backing up everything to a thumb
drive and transferring it from one device to another;
• No need to copy all stuff from one PC to another
when buying a new one. It also means you can
create a repository of information that stays with
you and keeps growing as long as you want them;
• Provides large amounts of processing power
comparable to supercomputer level;
II. THE TECHNOLOGICAL IMPACT OF CLOUD COMPUTING
ON HIGHER EDUCATION
The cloud based education system requires the use and
creation of knowledge in higher education as a decisive
factor for social, economic, cultural and technological
transformation. Achieving this goal necessarily involves the
use of technology, which would allow knowledge
transmission and create new areas for education, research and
development.
The impact of cloud in education [8] has attracted
researchers and countries attention all over the world,
especially due to technological implications of and open
access to knowledge. The general infrastructure for providing
conceptual and operational integration of ICT [9] in all
activity fields and daily life areas translates, in the case of
higher education, into management, education and research
[10]. Thus, the conceptual framework of integrating cloud
computing in higher education is reflected in aspects
concerning: policy, objectives and incentives; resources and
facilities; computer resources; teaching and learning
activities; processes of performance monitoring and
evaluation as in “Fig.1”. The rapid evolution of technology
provides many opportunities as in Table 1 [11], but it also
creates tensions that are difficult to manage as well as
changes that are often difficult to implement.
Figure 1. Conceptual Framework of Cloud Integration
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TABLE I. IMPACT OF CLOUD COMPUTING ON EDUCATION,
RESEARCH AND INNOVATION
Users Cloud Computing Implications
Students ¾ Open, computer-based educational offers
¾ Digital Learning Environment
¾ Educational methods with personal portfolio
¾ Web-based self-service
¾ Intelligent environments of synchronous and
social learning
Teachers ¾ Computer-based, integrated and flexible
teaching systems
¾ Training facilities for educational innovation
¾ Easy access to educational and research
content
¾ Blog Web sites for collaboration and
knowledge building
¾ Use of presentation software and of digital
content
Researchers ¾ Collaboration and transparent sharing of
research infrastructures
¾ Access to digital data and information
¾ Knowledge of the economic demands and
carrying out research in accordance with
these demands
III. CLOUD ADOPTION STRATEGY ROADMAP
Migrating towards cloud needs a well-defined strategy
that supports Cloud Computing capabilities. Representing an
important part of the organization IT strategy, migration must
be aligned to this. The success of the strategy implementation
depends on the existence of a service-oriented architecture
[12] at the level of the institution that offers the necessary
infrastructure for cloud implementation. Also, in order to
have success, the cloud strategy must be aligned with the
institutional strategy. Starting from the recent researches
related to the transition to Cloud Computing- a migrating
strategy towards cloud formed of the following stages has
been suggested as in “Fig. 2”.
Figure 2. Cloud Migration Roadmap
 Figure 3. Detailed components of four stages
A. Stage One
This step consists of developing the knowledge by
participating at seminaries, conferences, discussions with the
suppliers and consulting the most recent researches in the
field. The success of the phase depends on the allocation of
sufficient resources for research, for understanding how
Cloud Computing functions in different organizational
structures from universities and between institutions, the
benefits and risks, policies and the best usage practices of
Cloud Computing. As with all software projects, the initial
stage of understanding users’ requirements in order to
determine whether the project is feasible. It is at this stage
that the initial requirements, feasibility and initial plan is to
be developed. During this phase thought should be given to
how the existing systems strengths and opportunities can be
maximised, weaknesses and threats minimised, the impact to
organisation culture, processes, and structure minimised, and
the effect to SLAs [13], how return on investment and costs
to adopting cloud computing can be managed and the
usability and access to resources will be assured and
maintained. Also the impact to organisational security
policies, standards and legal and compliance issues in order
to analyse the strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats
of existing systems a SWOT matrix is useful. The detail of
stage components are depicted in the “Fig. 3”.
554
B. Stage Two.
In this phase benchmarks for security, legal and
compliance issues identified in the analysis phase are set.
The benchmarks will reflect the internal organisational best
practices, policies and standards to industry standards and
best practices and how these can be achieved when moving
to the cloud. The benchmarks will reflect the legal and
compliance best practices that need to be maintained and
achieved in the cloud environment. Financing and cost
management plan is developed in this stage and how costs
will be managed. The plan on how to ensure security
compliance, legal and compliance to industry standards and
regulation is laid down. In preparing the adoption or roll-out
plan it is important at this stage to decide whether
prototyping of the cloud services will be used and whether
there will be pilot projects before full roll-out and identifying
risks and how they are to be mitigated. Evaluating the
present stage from the point of view of the IT needs,
structure and usage that may be migrated or need to be
maintained within the institution is taken care at this stage.
With respect to the IT needs, their structure and usage, the
analysis may start from the categories of users who interact
with the present IT infrastructure and their necessities. The
objective is to identify the emergent technologies, efficient
from the point of view of costs [14] that satisfy the
necessities of the students and university staff. The hardware
and software needs shall then be analysed from the
perspective of cloud models as in “Fig. 4”.
 Figure 4. Evaluation process of experimental Cloud solution
C. Stage Three.
This stage is a preparation phase for the actual migration
of systems and/or applications selected to the cloud platform
and infrastructure of choice. In this phase systems/
application integration is done to ensure that the candidate
applications will be able to function with the internal
applications that are not migrated to the cloud and also with
the cloud infrastructure of choice. Outsourcing strategies are
decided upon and the benchmarks developed in the second
stage are used to measure vendor ability to provide service
that will not affect the organisation service delivery and
business. The last thing in this stage is contract development
and signing that meets the user requirements for using cloud
services. The transition to cloud may be achieved gradually,
starting from testing a pilot project in cloud and then
externalizing the applications chosen for cloud. The
maintenance of low costs for using the solution must be
permanently taken into account.
D. Stage Four.
At this stage the migrating to the cloud concludes and
migration can proceed. Either the project can be discarded or
enhanced to meet the user requirements. Given the outcomes
from the three previous phases, the roll-out plan can be put
into practice. Applications and data migration can proceed.
Support to users during the migration process is provided,
and the monitoring and control of the project is maintained to
ensure successful migration. The solution now should be
fully operational in the cloud; however contract and vendor
management, testing and maintenance, user support and
review should be ongoing for several months subsequent to
launch. The system metrics or benchmarks developed and set
in stage 3 can be used as indicators of success and should be
monitored Security standards compliance, SLAs, legal and
compliance issues, IT governance best practices and cost
management are desirable metrics. Also documentation of
lessons learnt and best practices during the project should be
555
Figure 5. Data migration scenario after cloud Adoption
documented and communicated to all stakeholders. The
solution implementation may be done in iterative phases,
through a continuous transition of the data, services and
processes towards cloud. Data migration must be performed
by keeping an optimum balance between the data accuracy,
migration speed, non-functioning time and minimum costs as
in “Fig. 5”.
IV. ESSENTIAL CRITERIA FOR CLOUD SELECTION IN
ROADMAP
Drivers for considering cloud computing solutions for
educational institutes should be identified in the context of
the institutional strategy and how well they align. The main
drivers for adoption of cloud computing within institutions
are economic, relating to the reduction in funding and the
need to increase competitiveness through better student and
staff experiences. Some of the essential selection criteria is
furnished below.
A. Open, standards-based Functionality
Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings are sometimes
based on proprietary languages and hosting providers.
Educational Institutes should choose an open, Java-based
framework for SaaS applications. An Institute can
unilaterally provision computing capabilities, such as server
time and network storage, as needed automatically without
requiring human interaction with each service’s provider.
B. Secured Access to resources
A robust SaaS application requires secure data access to
ensure each user/student/staff sees only data that belongs to
their tenant. Best practice design gives each table a tenant
identifier column and filters all queries using that identifier.
Capabilities are available over the network and accessed
through standard mechanisms that promote use by
heterogeneous thin or thick client platforms (e.g. mobile
phones, laptops, and PDAs).
C. Resource pooling
The provider’s computing resources are pooled to serve
multiple consumers like teachers and staff using a multi-
tenant model, with different physical and virtual resources
dynamically assigned and reassigned according to academic
demand. There is a sense of location independence in that the
students generally have no control or knowledge over the
exact location of the resources but may be able to specify
location at a higher level of abstraction. Examples of
resources include storage, processing, memory, network
bandwidth and virtual machines.
D. Dynamic Backup and Recovery
Our proposed EsaaS (Education Software as a service)
suggests to add student-specific data extensions without
affecting the overall data schema [15]. Best practice designs
include using a pre-allocated field in each table to hold
custom XML data extensions or using name/value pair
tables. ESaaS users are uneasy about entrusting all data and
backups to a SaaS provider. When an application server fails,
users should transparently failover. Similarly, when a
database server fails, the application should failover to a
backup server instance and restarts a new backup server.
E. Elastic Allocation
Capabilities can be rapidly and elastically provisioned, in
some cases automatically, to quickly scale up capacity. The
capabilities can then be rapidly released when additional
capacity is no longer required. End users have been trained
by Web 2.0 applications like MyYahoo and FaceBook to
expect that the application user interface will be under their
control. A drag and drop framework for enabling end users to
configure their own dashboards is essential for a competitive
SaaS offering. The cloud architecture should include the
capability to dynamically expanding and contracting the pool
of application and data servers.
F. Measured service
Cloud systems automatically control and optimise
resource use by leveraging a metering capability at a level of
abstraction appropriate to the type of service (e.g., storage,
processing, bandwidth, and active user accounts). Resource
usage can be monitored, controlled, and reported on,
providing transparency for both the provider and consumer
of the service utilised.
V. STRATEGIC FOCUS TO THE ROADMAP AND
FUTURE WORK
Successful adoption of cloud computing is key for
realisation of benefits promised by cloud computing
environment. As organisations are faced with the need for
high processing capabilities, large storage capabilities, IT
resource scalability and high availability, at the lowest
possible cost, cloud computing becomes an attractive
alternative[16]. However, the nature of cloud computing
556
Figure 6. Interrelation of the criterion for Cloud Selection
pose challenges to organisation as they consider it. Issues
such as security, legal and regulatory compliance become
more prevalent. The aim of the research was to investigate
the challenges facing cloud computing adoption and
synthesise a roadmap which will provide organisations with
guidelines for successful cloud computing adoption by
addressing the challenges identified.
The roadmap is an open framework that can be used in
any organisation and for any cloud computing platform and
infrastructure as guidance towards successful cloud
computing adoption. The proposed roadmap was divided into
four stages. These stages would help to analyse similar
adoption process. Future work should also include
assessment of the several issues proposed, such as planning
and analysis phase that addresses the needs of newly
established organisations, re-categorisation of the roadmap
issues based on strategic focus. By using the developed
roadmap, business and IT managers will have a better
understanding of the different key issues facing cloud
adoption and will provide them with a tool to guide the
process of cloud computing adoption.
VI. CONCLUSION
Cloud computing promises a radical shift in the
provisioning of computing resources within an organization.
It is penetrating into various domains and environments,
from theoretical computer science to economy, from
marketing hype to educational curriculum and from R&D lab
to enterprise IT infrastructure [17]. Educational institutes are
at the beginning of a transition period during which they face
many challenges with respect to cloud adoption. In this
paper, we have presented a roadmap for cloud computing in
higher education [18], with a focus on the adoption
strategies. Following the steps described in the roadmap,
successful cloud computing adoption can be achieved in
higher education. Our future work consists of validating the 17. H. Li, J. Sedayao, J. H. Steichen, E. Jimison, C. Spence, and S.
usability of the roadmap in general cases and providing the Chahal, “Developing an Enterprise Cloud Computing
Strategy”, Intel White paper, January 2009.
evaluation of cloud system adoption derived from the steps
18. A. Hossain Masud, X. Huang, “An E-learning System
contained in the roadmap. Architecture based on Cloud Computing”, World Academy of
Science, Engineering and Technology , Vol: 62, 2012.
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