E-Learning System Architecture for Cloud Computing – A review

Abstract

The recent past has witnessed the e-learning systems gaining more popularity in view of the technological development in support of e-learning and the number of heterogeneous devices connected with such systems. The field of education has already been affected by the infiltration of digital technology connected with the forecast of Internet of Things (IoT) foreseeing approximately fifty billion heterogeneous smart devices to be active by 2020. Cloud computing has a tremendous potential and has attracted educational sector for delivery of educational contents in an economical, secure and reliable way. Today’s cloud architecture is composed of distributed computing, grid computing, virtualization technologies and its architecture makes available a flexible execution environments in which different resources can be linked to application and platform components. The continuity of architecture is its capability make alterations in itself and at the same time to retain the strength of objectives and this feature of a cloud system has an impact on the economic withstanding. This ability of cloud systems help in maintaining the technical sustainability. The introduction of Fog Computing adds value to this scenario. The interconnection of such a huge number of smart electronic devices is expected to generate large amount of data which sometimes be analyzed in real time. This adds new type of big data and could be called as educational big data. The data generated by different sources such as study material, tests etc. needs well defined mining and analysis techniques in order to get time bound accurate information. The present paper reviews the current state of cloud based e-learning systems, compares the available cloud based e-learning architecture with the aim to enhancing the ability of cloud based e-learning architecture in view of present technologies like Internet of Things (IoT), Fog Computing(FC) and Big Data Streams.