The education cloud of the gradual climate

Absrtact: Cloud computing, as a service delivery and usage model, announces the potential for Low-cost supercomputing services. Cloud computing is thought to be an on-demand, scalable way to get the services it needs, either it and software, Internet-related, or any other service.

Then, cloud computing as a result of the promotion of building, sharing, winning a new generation of social network perfect combination, so quickly become the focus of the industry. Since the world of cloud computing, the various manufacturers have been joining the camp, the pattern of cloud products and cloud technology flooded the market

"Cloud" brings new opportunities for education

Resource construction is one of the important guarantee for the realization of educational informatization, and it has a far-reaching strategic significance for the development of educational informatization in China. The application of cloud computing in the education industry will promote the sharing of educational information resources, according to a survey by the Market Research Institute. At present, the education industry has begun to implement some cloud computing projects, such as the Guangzhou University based on cloud computing infrastructure platform centralized management solutions for different users in Guangzhou University to provide a variety of resource systems and services.

From High-quality resources to education cloud construction, as a new IT service model, cloud computing is closely combined with education and teaching. Meanwhile, the different bearing form, also changing people to the education resources, based on cloud computing technology, the concept and category of educational resources expanding, computational power resources, platform resources, knowledge and skills, data resources, experience and analysis, have become more abundant extension of educational resources. Today's educational resources are no longer just digital information resources, but include computing, efficiency and environmental resources, from physical storage state to ubiquitous service delivery. The education informatization construction will appear a brand-new stratification plane, that is the education cloud to many kinds of information resources reorganization and the optimization, finally realizes the large-scale, the high efficiency resources sharing.

What is the education cloud?

Although it has not yet formed a true sense of "education cloud", but some institutions have begun to study the application of education cloud, as a variety of phased results "surfaced", education cloud gradually become climate. As early as 2008, East China Normal University was concerned about the application of cloud computing in education, now with a number of enterprises to explore the architecture of education cloud design and construction, including with the IBM China Research Institute, the use of IBM's voice recognition cloud services to build a teaching video resource library, and Shanghai, China division of the Beijing Cooperation Research "Green class pass" service cloud, Cooperate with Dell to build educational services cloud pilot in China. Beijing Normal University is to construct a "teacher education digital resource Cloud service platform" for the National normal colleges and some primary and secondary schools. The educational resource platform based on cloud computing is an important part in the demonstration project of "intelligent Campus" which is being constructed by Foshan Institute of Science and Technology. Many colleges and universities are considering switching to IaaS when upgrading their network infrastructure.

No uniform definition

"The definition of the education cloud has not yet been unified. "East China Normal University education Information System Engineering Research Center director Zhiting said."

Nevertheless, there are still many people in the industry who have expressed their opinions. Liu Yan, director of Information Network Center of Beijing Normal University, thinks that the education cloud is to provide users with the resources of educational services through the cloud computing model. It is a kind of integration and development, which is related to the establishment of centralized management mode and resource integration, the establishment of public IT service and resource application in the University informatization.

Li Yunhui, director of the Department of Education and Science, Foshan Institute of Science and Technology, said that education cloud is an educational information service platform. Through the "one-stop" application and "cloud" concept, to break the educational information boundary, so that all schools, teachers and students have an available, equal platform.

Guo Qingshong, director of the Network and Information Technology center of Sun Yat-sen University, said that the education cloud is a platform and a way to provide quality education services to users by integrating ideas and techniques of educational technology, learning support services and innovative thinking.

No matter what kind of "coat" The education cloud wears, its essence is based on cloud computing architecture, in-depth integration of a variety of resources, systems, services, on-demand to provide users with rental or free services to meet users in learning, research, management, life, entertainment, social and other needs. As long as the user has the network and terminal equipment, can be like using water and electricity, whenever and wherever the need for educational resources.

What resources can users get? Lu Yiqin, Director of the Information Network Research center of South China University of Technology, said: "The resources of domestic colleges and universities are mainly focused on scientific research, teaching, educational management and style." In broad sense, the educational resources include human resources, and the non human resources are roughly divided into public and professional resources, all of which are suitable for the "cloud". ”

All the resources and systems that can be applied on the cloud platform should be covered by the education cloud. The education cloud gathers numerous applications to provide services to users. "There will be more practical applications in the future," Xiang Yunping said. "Liu Yan said.

The value of shared educational resources

At present, at the national level, the digital gap between the east and the West is huge, the educational resources flow is obviously different, which poses a great obstacle to the education equity, and challenges to the construction of lifelong learning and the learning Society of all people. From the school level, the information construction at the same time, there are many problems: low-level duplication, information systems "The phenomenon is serious, education resources are difficult to open and share, invest a lot of manpower, material resources, financial resources, but not obtain the corresponding benefit." The society urgently needs a kind of efficient and fair resource sharing, and the development of university Informationization is going to the demand-oriented and user-centric service. The concept of education cloud came into being under such background.

Education cloud is the technical basis for realizing the learning society and promoting the development of information technology. On the "cloud" can build a large-scale shared education resource pool, building a new library, creating a "cloud" environment for teaching and scientific research, establishing a web-based learning platform and providing users with educational resources through cloud computing and cloud storage platforms can save investment, improve the utilization of hardware systems, reduce management costs, and expand the use of resources. It is beneficial to cluster, share, upgrade and push the resources, solve the problem of uneven distribution of educational resources, slow updating speed and low sharing, and promote the balanced development of educational resources.

The core of education cloud Platform

The nature of the education cloud fits seamlessly with the service-oriented nature of cloud computing, making it logical to choose cloud computing as an infrastructure. "Cloud computing platform is a powerful ' cloud ' network that connects a large number of concurrent network computing and services, leverages virtualization technology to expand the capabilities of each server, and integrates its resources across the cloud platform to provide supercomputing and storage capabilities." "Yang said.

He introduced the general architecture of the cloud computing platform. The structure is generally divided into: 1. Cloud Client: Provides the interactive interface of cloud user request service. 2. Service directory: In the Cloud Client interface to generate a corresponding icon or list of the form of display related services. 3. Management systems and Deployment tools: provide management and resource services to users. 4. Monitoring: monitor and measure the use of cloud system resources and make rapid response. 5. Server clusters: Virtual or physical servers responsible for providing computing power, data storage, and application services.

Based on the common architecture, three types of services have been proposed: infrastructure as Service (IaaS), Platform as Service (PaaS), Software as service (SaaS). Some universities have already done further exploration and practice in the accepted structure and service mode. Zhongshan University will be the IaaS decomposition of a naas layer, the purpose is to make the system more flexible, more convenient resources management, can more easily provide users with personalized customizable services, but also more easily integrated with external resources, to provide users with transparent packaged services.

In addition to introducing a general cloud computing architecture, to build a good education cloud, the key is ' on-demand deployment ', which must address dynamic refactoring, monitoring, and automated deployments of resources, which need to be based on technologies such as virtualization, high-performance storage, processors, high-speed Internet. Special attention is paid to the key technologies such as dynamic reconfiguration of resources, automated deployment, resource monitoring, virtualization, high-performance storage, and processor. "Li Yunhui said.

In addition, the establishment of resource pool, resource management and scheduling, software platform (PaaS) supporting SaaS business system and some middleware platform are the key links.

The challenge of Education cloud

The education cloud is certainly a well-deserved one. Although the industry still has some controversy, the general focus is on the "cloud computing" itself speculation overheating. But the idea of an education cloud is no longer disputed.

However, after all, the education cloud is a new thing, for the education sector, the path to the educational cloud will be more and more people pay attention to the road.

First, the education cloud lacks the clear construction, the application, the operation mechanism. "If we can form the rules of social recognition, then it is conducive to the development of education cloud, easy to form a tacit understanding of sharing." This is not a year or two to solve. "Liu Yan said.

Secondly, the standard of education cloud is not uniform. Cloud computing itself lacks the unified standard, the application system which runs on the cloud platform is very different, difficult to have the unified resource management, the resource release, the resource application.

At present, there are some colleges and universities in the education cloud on the innovative application of the standard formulation work, for example, East China Normal University is leading the development of electronic schoolbag standards, Huazhong Normal University is developing the relevant standards of virtual laboratories.

Third, the data stored on the cloud platform has a variety of security risks. The security of the cloud platform itself, how the cloud platform to ensure the normal operation of the business, cloud Platform management credit reliability of how to identify, are users have to maintain a cautious attitude. The Amazon Cloud Data center has seen a major disruption in service outages recently, and industry insiders say the incident will prompt many organizations to reconsider whether to migrate their IT resources to cloud computing data centers that they cannot control.

Other challenges facing the education cloud include: cloud computing itself network traffic, data storage, application acceleration and energy consumption and other technical issues, application system deployment and migration issues, the interests of each unit and the management system of the difference between the formation of the shackles of systematic coordination, commercial software to build cloud services high cost, triple network integration, Three-screen integration and so on the education cloud brings the new thinking, the new technology to the old IT application model impact, looking for a party is beneficial to the operation of the model.

Education cloud is a complex system engineering, in the way forward inevitably have a variety of "stumbling block", but the education cloud is not far away from us.

(Responsible editor: admin)