Journal of Student Research (2017) MEC, Muscat, OMAN

Smart E-Learning System Architecture based on

Cloud Computing
Jawaher Ahmed Mohammed AL Busaidia, Muhammad Sohail Hayata
With the advent of new technologies, companies and academic institutions are striving to keep pace with the advancement in
Information and Communication Technologies and to streamline the way to manage or upgrade their IT resources. Cloud
Computing provides an alternative solution to achieve these objectives within budget. A number of colleges and universities all
over the world are implementing cloud infrastructure to reduce the IT operational cost and increasing the effectiveness and
convenience of educational services. Cloud computing can play an important role in the education sector in providing ubiquitous
access (anytime, anywhere, independent of device) to the learning material. This approach provides a new way to design and
manage IT resources in an efficient manner not only by increasing the user’s productivity and hardware utilization but also
decreasing infrastructure cost through virtualization. This research paper presents a smart e-learning system based on cloud
platform in delivering and sharing e-learning resources. The authors also discuss the features of the smart E-Learning system
over the traditional system and propose architecture of smart e-learning system for the education institutions.

Keywords: Smart E-learning system, Smart Education, Virtualization, Cloud Computing.

In traditional teaching, classrooms environment is

Introduction lecturecentered wherever the lecture often talks to the
Cloud computing is playing a major role in Information students instead of encouraging then to the ask
Technology, with its potential benefits to offers questions, interact, and make student understand the
flexibility, accessibility, scalability, high performance, lesson thoroughly. In the most classes involve routine
reliability, and cost reduction. As a result of, learning, where most of the students depend on the
organizations all over the world are utilizing cloud memorizing topics without having a full understanding
computing to operate and expand their businesses while of the topics to pass the exams. Long dictations and
reducing IT-related operating costs. Cloud computing lectures in the classroom usually leave the student to
attracted a great deal of attention in the field of the less engaged and attentive. In a traditional class, time
education in order to provide better educational services limitation restricts the students to complete collaborative
within limited IT budget. As we are aware that number activates. Also, it results in skipping classes and missing
of schools and educational institutions are increasing, by lessons. Furthermore, traditional class has no
adopting cloud computing will not only help institutions opportunity for interact with their teachers and their
to save their IT costs, but also help the institutions to classmates after the class contact hours.
provide efficient and convenient educational services.
There are many learning management systems such as: Lacks emphasis on the critical thinking, traditional
Moodle, Blackboard, etc. Moreover, it supporting cloud teaching methods lacks in encouraging students to think
based educational services [1]. critically and apply the skills gained by reasoning and
experience. Traditional teaching methods lacks students-
Problems Statement centered learning in which the role of lecturer as
Education has been the integral part of the people life as facilitator. This method of learning is not give student
sleeping and eating. It is created so many generations to deeper levels of understanding needed for lifelong
thousands of years and remains doing so in our present. learning and complex concepts.
Now a day, technology has changed therefore many new
thing as well as manner they digest information. As you Poor process oriented learning, traditional methods
can see the digital tools become replacing traditional emphasizes only passing exams, whether or not student
teaching methods such as: computer, audio, visual, and under examine material. The learning process is like this
computer. devalued, and student does not encourage for understand
In part of develop country the traditional teaching style the ways, skills and techniques needed to find solutions.
are used in educational organization. In the traditional constructivist learning holds the process equally
teaching method, the lectures explain all concept to the important as result due to it
students with help of the blackboard and chalks. stimulates skills important as long after schooling
Therefore, all important topic is written on the
blackboard so student can have written notes. By the Due to changes in technology, and internationalization
way, the aim of students in tradition teaching is to pass are powerful education system for evolve to provide
the exams only. flexible education environment, which offers learners

a.
Department of Computing, Middle East College, Knowledge Oasis, Muscat, Sultanate of Oman
Journal of Student Research (2017) MEC, Muscat, OMAN

with the quality function encompassing formal, non The given below comparison highlight the benefits of
formal education and formal. From this point, is fully cloud computing over traditional computing.
approach to integrate IT in education, improve learning
present and future, to ensure the student and teachers
effective use of the new technologies such as Learning
management system. Joining the quality of the
information from traditional methods with the effective
learning and the using of learning Management system
tools in lectures time holds promise as the progressive
stander that become wide range of the learning skills
and will contract attention of all students from digital
generation and fast-paces.

Literature Review
Now a day, cloud computing is main key of innovation
in the computing industry. It is based on network so it
basically on the internet. Is to ensure to provide to user a
simple uses of computing resources on the demand.
Cloud computing is high level of scalable with establish
virtualized resources that able to available to the users.
Therefor, cloud computing is a great technology that
have signification impact on the learning environment Figure 1: Traditional computing vs. Cloud computing
and teaching [2]. [2]

Additionally, cloud computing is considered as on- Traditional E-Learning to Smart E-Learning

demand provision of the computing power, applications, Traditional e-learning employs internet based learning.
IT resources and database storage via cloud services Using E-Learning over Internet improve the efficiency
platform through internet with the pay-as-you go pricing of the educational services as it offer a lot of benefits
(Amazon,2017). Cloud computing has three main types: like: diversity, flexibility, openness, control and a lot
Private, Public and Hybrid cloud. more. Figure 2 represents the architecture of a simplified
Private cloud mean that all application and cloud E-Learning system.
resources are managing by company itself, alike to
intranet functionality. The private cloud vender provides
scalable resources and virtual application, these two are
available together to cloud users in order to use and
share. In addition, it is more secure due to specified
internal exposure. And only the designee and company
can be access to the operate in the private cloud.
Public Cloud is where resources are dynamical provided
in fine-grained, self services via the internet, by web
services or web application by the third party offers that
shares resources and charge the user as per their usage
of these resources. On the other hand, public cloud is
less secure than private cloud due to places on additional
burden of make sure that each application and data
accessed in the public cloud are protected from
malicious attacks.

Hybrid Cloud is the combination of private and public Figure 2: Architecture of a simplified E-Learning
cloud. The hybrid Cloud offers the scalability and cost system [2]
effectiveness of the public Cloud along with
performance and security of private Cloud. The
companies do not need to change their underlying IT
infrastructure [3]. Proposed System

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Journal of Student Research (2017) MEC, Muscat, OMAN

The proposed system provides a method to deliver and system. The proposed smart e-learning system offers
share educational resources through smart e-learning security, availability, resiliency, data preservation and
system using private cloud. The proposed system utilize reliability.
Private cloud environment to take the full control of
cloud services at the institution premises. As discussed Cloud Computing Architecture
earlier, it can reduce the IT costs, and increases The Smart E-learning System is not replacing lectures, it
scalability, flexibility, availability and security of the allows lecturers to utilize the advancement in
smart e-learning system. It helps institutions to create technology, tools and concepts, upload a new content,
and share different forms of the learning contents models for methods for teaching, therefore the lectures
available on their Learning Management System roles impossible to replace. The lecture will be still the
through the cloud platform. (Mihye Kim,2013). Figure leader of roles and at the same time is marking and
3 demonstrate the Smart E-Learning system improving of the smart e-learning system cloud. The
Architecture. learning strategy must develop an educational act.
Furthermore, the virtual collaboration and interactive
content guarantee a high retention factor. On the other
side, smart elearning cloud is immigration of cloud
computing technology in the scope of the e-learning, it
is future of smart e-learning infrastructure, consist all
important software and hardware resources engaging in
the e-learning. After computer resources are
virtualization, they provide it as form of services for the
education organization, businesses and student to rent
computing resources.

Figure 3: Smart E-Learning System Architecture

A. Features of proposed system

The proposed system utilized the benefits of private
cloud in order to provide better educational services by
integrating with existing IT technologies, for instances:
virtualization, data synchronization, multi-sharing and
services provisioning. Moreover, specific software and Figure 4: Smart E-learning Cloud Architecture [2]
application needed to provide enhanced educational
service in the educational institution using private cloud The architecture of smart e-learning using cloud consists
and can employ different services models of cloud of five layers:
computing (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS). • An infrastructure layer that provides dynamic and
Implementing private cloud helps the educational scalable pool of physical resources
institutions to take the advantage of cloud security at the • Software layer that provide user-friendly interface
maximum extent to protect their IT resources by only to the learner.
allowing the access to the legitimate users. Automation • Resources management layer that is responsible
in the cloud provides the advantage to recover a failure for managing hardware and software resources.
node without affecting the operation of the cloud

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Journal of Student Research (2017) MEC, Muscat, OMAN

• Service layer that provides software, platform, or libraries and full sharing of human resources.
infrastructure as a service. This layer basically contains of education
• Application layer. objectives, content production, assessment and
management component and content delivery
1. Infrastructure layer is collected between technology.
teaching resources and information
infrastructure, it consists of Intranet/Internet, Expected Benefits Of The Proposed Architecture
information management system, system
software and some common hardware and The intended benefits expected from the proposed smart
software. Teaching resources is traditional elearning architecture are:
teaching model and distributed in various
departments and domain. This layer is placed 1. High Security: Private cloud can manage the
in the lowest level of the cloud service resources more efficiently, balance the load
middleware, the main computing power such and allows network administrator to control the
physical memory, CPU. By using virtualization security of the user’s data and perform real-
technology, storage, physical server and time monitoring of the resource.
network form virtualization group to bring 2. Virtualization: It helps the institutions to:
named by upper software platform. The • Reduce power consumption and datacenter
physical host pool is a dynamic and scalable, a space
new physical host enable to added in order to • Increase hardware utilization
enhance physical computing power to cloud • Lower upfront costs, including licensing
middleware services. fees
• Simplify application and desktop lifecycle
2. Software resource layer is combined by management
middleware and operating system. Via • Lower operational costs for both
middleware technology, selection of the maintenance and training
software resources is integrated for provide a 3. High Availability: One of the main benefit of
unified interface to software designer, therefore cloud computing is automation to provide high
it easy to develop many of application based on quality of service. In case of any failure node,
software resource and embed them to cloud, cloud system can automatically detect it and
and it available to the cloud computing users. remove/replace it, thereby bot effecting the
operation of the cloud.
3. Resources management layer is major to 4. Ubiquitous Access: Users can the system from
achieve loose coupling of hardware and anywhere, anytime and from any device.
software resources. By integration of the cloud 5. Students can collaborate with each other
computing and virtualization scheduling through the proposed smart e-learning system.
strategy. The proposed system can play a major role in
utilizing the existing IT resources of the
4. Server layer has three level of services which institutions at the fullest and enhancing the
are: (Software as a services, Platform as a quality of the learning and teaching process in
services, Infrastructure as a services). In SaaS a better way.
cloud computing services is provide only to
customers. As is various form traditional Figure 5 depicts the interactive mode of the proposed
software, users software by internet, no need to architecture.
one-time purchase to hardware or software.
Moreover, no need for upgrade and maintain,
only paying a monthly fee.

5. Application layer is definite application of the

integration the teaching resources in cloud
computing model, consist of sharing the
teaching resources and interactive courses.
Sharing teaching resources contain material
resources of teaching, information resources
for instance: information center, digital

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Journal of Student Research (2017) MEC, Muscat, OMAN

[6] Nazir, M. (2012). Cloud Computing: Overview & Current

Research Challenges. IOSR Journal of Computer Engineering, 8(1),
pp.14-22.

[7] Bbcactive.com. (2010). Innovative teaching methods vs

the traditional university lecture. [online] Available at:
http://www.bbcactive.com/BBCActiveIdeasandResources/Inn
ovativeteachingmethodsvsthetraditionaluni.aspx [Accessed 2 May
2017].

[8] Arzel Online. (2013). Are Traditional Teaching Methods

Still Effective?. [online] Available at:
https://arzelonline.wordpress.com/2012/06/25/are-traditionalteaching-
methods-still-effective/ [Accessed 1 May 2017].
Figure 5: Interactive mode of the proposed architecture.

[9] Jaebi, I. (2017). Disadvantages of Traditional Classroom

Conclusion Training | Synonym. [online] Classroom.synonym.com. Available at:
http://classroom.synonym.com/disadvantagestraditional-classroom-
Smart E-Learning enhances the efficiency and quality of training-7866705.html [Accessed 29 Apr. 2017].
teaching and learning process. Smart e-learning system
provides an alternative solution to the institutions that
are striving to keep pace with the advancement in
Information and Communication Technologies and to
streamline the way to manage or upgrade their IT
resources. It not only reduces the IT operational costs
but also provides away of delivering more economical,
securable, and reliable education services. The research
paper discussed the traditional e-learning system and
proposed a smart e-learning system based on cloud
platform in delivering and sharing e-learning resources.
The authors discussed the features of the smart E-
Learning system over the traditional system and
proposed architecture of smart elearning system for the
education institutions.

References

[1] Jeong, J., Kim, M. and Yoo, K. (2013). A Content

Oriented Smart Education System based on Cloud Computing.
International Journal of Multimedia and Ubiquitous Engineering,
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[2] Huang, X. and Masud, M.A.H. (2012) 'An E-learning

System Architecture based on Cloud Computing',
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and Information Engineering, vol. 6, pp. 255-259.

[3] Javadi, B., Buyya, R. and Abawajy, J. (2012) 'Failure

aware resource provisioning for hybrid Cloud infrastructure', Journal
of Parallel Distributed Computing, pp. 1318-1331.

[4] Lff.iite.unesco.org. (2017). Effective Integration of ICT in

Teaching and Learning - Learning For the Future. [online] Available
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[5] Amazon Web Services, Inc. (2017). What is Cloud
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