Promoting Rural Education through Cloud Computing – An Analysis Sharad Saxena1 , Shilpi Saxena2 , Vishal Raj Kohli3 , and Deepak Mehta4 1
Asstt. Prof. School of Mathematics and Computer Application, Thapar University, Patiala, Punjab, India 2 Lecturer, Rani Laxmi Bai Mahila Degree College, Meerut, India 3 Asso. Prof. Department of Computer Application, Bharat Institute of Technology, Meerut, India 4 Asstt. Prof. Department of Computer Application, Lovely Professional University, Phagwara, Punjab, India
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Abstract. Information Technology (IT) has become a hub for vast information in Education among continents. To serve business requirements IT has to incur heavy cost towards hardware, software and skills needed. Cloud computing has emerged as an economical way to host and serve various communities thorough internet technologies. The services are available cheaply or almost freely to educational sectors, institution and business. The future fore-casting thus can be made where educational services will only be hosted in the cloud and institutions no longer invest money, in hosting their data centers in expensive hardware, salaries, power bills and other resources. We therefore, in this paper have surveyed the consequences of cloud computing in promoting education in rural areas in India. Keywords: cloud computing, education, learning resources
1. Introduction Basic education, mean education and literacy for all, is acknowledged today as one of the key point for society development. The collaboration of universities, researchers, industry and government have proven their worth contribution in transforming society and the entire world economy [1]. With the invention of new technology the educational services have migrated from traditional form to online web services. These services need to be provided adequately by managing proper technology so as to provide accessibility, fast and securely, in rural areas [2]. To enable online services the universities should divert towards service oriented and must optimize the efficiency and effectiveness of educational material [3]. Service orientation may be applicable not only to each university, institution and schools but also to technology. At organization level cloud computing can be considered as extension of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) [4]. Many universities like California University, UTU University India, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science higher education UK, Africa [5]. CCS University, India, etc have identified the potential of cloud computing in higher education and education broadcasting. Cloud computing make them focus on teaching and research activities both in developed and rural areas rather than on complex IT configuration and software system. Cloud computing offers many advantages to e-learning solutions by allowing platform, infrastructure, virtualization and centralized data storage facilities. Ready [6], had proposed a community-source project so as to provide business continuity planning service. This is a good example of spreading higher education in terms of cloud services. Cloud computing, if we see today becomes a necessity to the universities and institutions to curtail high cost of software and hardware, for students success, performance appraisal and to face community competition [7]. According to Katz, 70% of IT leaders from higher education agreed upon that improving IT services is the most important decision factor, while only 30% gave the importance to costs reduction [8]. McKinsey suggests that “using clouds for computing tasks promises a revolution in IT similar to the birth of the web and e-commerce.” Reeves conclude that “IT is finally catching up with the Internet by extending the enterprise outside of the traditional data center walls [9].” Writers, Nicholas Carr state that a so-called big switch is ahead, wherein a great many applications, infrastructure, and supporting tasks now operated by enterprises, in the near future will be handled by very-large-scale, highly standardized counterpart activities and delivered over the Internet. 1
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2. Cloud Computing and Relevance in Education Cloud computing services are classified in to three categories [10]: Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), where any customers can rent basic computing resources like processors and storage and make use of them to run their Operating System and Applications. Platform as a service (PaaS), where a customer can install their applications on the platform provided by service provider e.g. Google Apps Engine. Software as a service (SaaS), where a customer can store data and applications on cloud through web browser e.g. MicrosoftLive@edu. Following are the advantages identified for cloud computing:Large data centers at Remote locations - Since cloud services are available through internet to remote location, a huge collection of educational data storage is available. Data servers can be managed remotely and efficiently by big educational institutions and user is no way aware of cost of managing hardware, software and data protection. Resource Pooling - Resources like data storage, bandwidth, processors, memory etc are shared among customers. These resources are distributed across multiple data centers. Pay per use – Educational services available on internet are either free or paid. Free services are informatory and a customer has to bear no expense, while for paid services a customer has to bear some nominal expenses. Thus a customer simply pay for the services that they use while a provider bear the cost of all hardware and software provision. Self service - Customers has the freedom to select learning resources and educational material they wish to use. Till date many universities have started education services as cloud computing by outsourcing email provision [11], e-learning and learning resources. Common examples are Google and Microsoft, as they are offering email services, Google Apps and MicrosoftLive@edu [12, 13] for free to educational sectors. These resources facilitate word processing, spreadsheets and presentations etc on web sites. The common architecture for cloud computing based rural education is shown in Figure 1. The reason for adopting cloud computing as technique for education broadcasting are identified asEconomies – since services like email, web hosting and learning resources are provided by external providers, hardware cost, installation, salary and maintenance cost of various institutions is saved. Expandability – any of the institution can start with small scale services without large expenditure. The service expansion can be achieved on demand. Wide availability – the availability of educational contents can be made available as and when required like, Google offers 99.9% availability for its educational application suite.
Cloud Education Environment
Web Based Education Portal
Learners Remote Database
Institutions /Industries
Figure 1. Cloud Based Rural Education System Architecture
3. Data Collection and Analysis In order to identify the impact of cloud education on rural areas, we have identified 10 cities (Meerut (M), Ghaziabad (G), Delhi (D), Hapur (H), Muzaffarnagar (Mu), Roorkee (R), Baraut (B), Saharanpur (S), Dehradun (Dh), Shamli (Sh) ) of India for data collection and analysis. For our survey we have considered those industries that are dealing in cloud services and somewhat indulge in spreading education through these services. The sample fact sheet is shown in Table 1. A client is allowed to rank against some key points between 5 (highest one) and 1(lowest one). The fact sheet showing industries and their response is shown in Table 2.
Table1. Sample Fact sheet 1, Cloud in Education
City
Industry (5) (4)
Title / Scale
(3)
(2)
(1)
Awareness, cloud base education Adoptability, cloud as tool Installation and configuration Resource availability Learners’ response Users’ training Government Aids Security issues Information Sharing Cost Reduction Openness Students’ acceptability Students’ gain Table 2. Industries Selected and Responded
S. N.
Cities
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
M G D H Mu R B S Dh Sh
Industries Selected 26 18 32 12 23 33 11 25 47 34
Industries Responded 20 17 29 9 20 29 11 22 41 28
% age 76.92 94.44 90.62 75.00 86.95 87.87 100.00 88.00 87.23 82.35
Participation % M
G
D
87.23
H
Mu
R
82.35 76.92
B
S
Dh
Sh
94.44
88
90.62 75
100 87.87
86.95
Figure 2. Industry Participation in survey
Throughout, in data collection and survey we have found that institutions and industries, those using or planning cloud computing techniques observe cost reduction not as potential benefit; indeed they are lowering costs by accessing less expensive computer resources over internet. Our research also suggests that cloud technologies compare to mobile technologies are more impressive in enriching economy, society development, developing new business and jobs and to improve existing educational system. Table 3 shows the average rating of selected cities on the specified point scale.
Table 2. Average rating of selected cities
S.N. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
Titles /Cities (Average Points) Awareness, cloud base education Adoptability, cloud as tool Installation and configuration Resource availability Learners’ response Users’ training Government Aids Security issues Information Sharing Cost Reduction Openness Students’ acceptability Students’ gain
M 3 3 2 4 4 3 2 4 3 2 3 3 3
G 4 3 3 4 4 3 2 2 2 4 4 3 4
D 4 3 4 5 4 3 3 4 5 4 5 3 4
H 2 2 2 3 3 2 2 3 4 2 2 2 2
Mu 2 1 2 2 2 4 1 4 2 3 2 2 2
R 3 3 2 3 3 4 3 4 3 2 3 3 3
B 2 2 1 2 2 4 3 4 3 2 3 2 3
S 2 2 2 3 3 4 2 3 2 3 2 3 3
Dh 5 4 5 5 4 3 4 3 3 3 2 3 5
Sh 2 2 3 2 3 4 3 3 4 2 3 2 4
Avg 2.9 2.5 2.6 3.3 3.2 3.4 2.5 3.4 3.1 2.7 2.9 2.6 3.3
Average rank given by industires
4 3.5 3 2.5 2 1.5 1 0.5 0
Figure 3. Average rank (between 1-5) given by industries
It is evident from Figure 3 that most of the industries facing difficulties in adopting and training users in rural community because of less literacy level, problems are in installation and configuration of devices because of non availability of technical person at remote location. Governments’ aids at all location are not sufficient enough for facilitation. Further because of poor economic conditions students are not able to arrange cheap resources to access data. Because of poor computer literacy the students’ acceptability in terms of knowledge is low. At the other edge the impact of education through cloud computing can observed in terms of high resource availability, learner’s response, user’s training and students’ gain. The moderate consequences are seen in terms of awareness of new technology, information sharing, openness, students’ acceptability and cost reduction. As a matter of conclusion the use of cloud computing in education as a starting point has gain good strength. Table 3. Industries most likely impacted by cloud computing
Industries/Rank (%) Manufacturing Mobile-com IT Government Healthcare Media Education
(5) 10 53 79 44 30 51 42
(4) 23 25 12 21 33 22 23
(3) 28 18 7 29 31 23 28
Point Scale 5
Point Scale 4
Point Scale 3
Manufacturing Mobile-com IT Government Healhcare Media Education 0
20
40
60
80
100
Figure 4. Industries (%) impacted by cloud computing
As can be seen from Figure 4, IT industries have highest usage of cloud computing, mobile communication media and government has moderate use of these services. Education sector and health center are progressive and are in phase of expanding and adopting new technologies. Manufacturing industries on the contrary have less benefit from cloud computing these days.
4. Conclusion and Results By reviewing the literature and widespread discussion with IT professionals, we may conclude that cloud computing is an important development for rural education. Hardware and software are commoditized, now it is up to you, how will you drive down the cost of IT, which is a fundamental shift (Michael King of IBM) for encouraging rural education through cloud computing. As it is quite evident that educational institutes needs guidance and that there may be many hindrances on the path. So as to wade through these obstacles we will have to take a magnifying lens to the cloud. Further, today a large number of educational institutions and universities are involved in wide discussions for plan of actions for cloud services for education. Other then India universities like Carnegie Mellon University, Indiana University, the University of California and others are also outperforming in the same era. A cloud education system once deployed and accessible to rural community can serve several benefits like: An application that run on cloud need no separate desktop with processing power and hard disk space, hence system in rural schools can be low priced having small hard disk, memory etc. No additional need for CD/DVD drive. Computer in cloud environment can boot and run faster. Security and maintenance is taken by universities and not by poor rural community. Accessibility of learning resources and study material become less expensive. Application and software updates are done automatically and are readily available. Contents are equally shareable simultaneously available to several places. The capital and total cost of IT id cut down in higher education. Enable IT for further standardization. Interoperability among disjoint technologies and within institutions From our research work in this paper we have concluded that some more efforts towards students’ training, knowledge awareness and government contribution is desirable. Cloud based education in rural area gaining high appreciation, less costly and easy to install. Only thing is to increase literacy, awareness and suitable training among rural community.
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