APPLICATION OF CLOUD COMPUTING ENVIRONMENT IN E-LEARNING PLATFORM DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

This paper presents a model of e-learning platform which provides PaaS services of educational institutions’ internally hosted cloud through a LMS system. The basic idea behind the model is that the Moodle LMS can be expanded through additional Web services that integrate the Moodle with the cloud platform of the educational institution which rely on Apache VCL. In the model the “extended Moodle” is used as the interface for the teachers and the students to virtual images, which provide virtual machines with specific environments for different assignments at different Moodle courses. The model implies that students can create their own virtual image for the assignment in the specific Moodle course, use the virtual machine executing the environment defined by the virtual image, in any time and from any place, save the changes to the virtual image and mark the virtual image as ready for evaluation. Teachers on the other hand can monitor and evaluate the students’ work, within a Moodle subsystem for evaluating students’ activities, by accessing virtual machines which run the students’ virtual image for the assignment. Single interface used for accessing all necessary learning resources allows students and teachers to focus their efforts on teaching and learning, instead of providing the conditions for the realization of these processes.