Harnessing Clouds for E-Learning: New Directions Followed by UNED Agustín C. Caminero, Antonio Robles-Gómez, Salvador Ros, Roberto Hernández, Rafael Pastor Dep. de Sistemas de Comunicación y Control Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, UNED Madrid, Spain {accaminero, arobles, sros, roberto, rpastor}@scc.uned.es, Nuria Oliva, Manuel Castro Dep. de Ingeniería Eléctrica, Electrónica y de Control Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, UNED Madrid, Spain {noliva, mcastro}@ieec.uned.es Abstract—In this paper, we present our work on enhancing the technological infrastructure at Spanish National University for Distance Education (UNED, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia) with cloud computing principles. This includes the development of (1) virtualized environments to allow students to do practical exercises easily in the field of networks and communications; and (2) load forecasting techniques to improve on the usage of the technological infrastructures of UNED, so that the Quality of Service (QoS) experienced by users is kept and power consumption is minimized. Keywords- cloud computing; e-learning; quality of service; power consumption; load forecasting. I. INTRODUCTION With the advent of the cloud technology [1], [2], more dynamic computing platforms are been developed. The cloud is a shift from the previous computing architectures in which computers had static software features, thus making users of such resources “fit” into those features. For example, if a shared computer has a Linux operating system installed along with some programs and libraries, users willing to run their applications on it had to make sure that their applications could run on such system. Hence, the use of computing systems could be considered as “computer guided”, since users had to fit their applications to meet the features of the computer. The cloud allows systems to dynamically provide the computing resources their users need, reducing expenses, energy consumption and improving on their scalability [3], [4], [5]. Hence, if users want to run some applications in a cloud, it is the computer which has to “fit” into the needs of the users. In the example above, Virtual Machines (VM) can be instantiated dynamically to meet the users’ requirements. The cloud system can thus be considered as a “user guided” system, since the computing resource is adapted to the users’ needs. Furthermore, an appropriate cloud infrastructure manager (such as OpenNebula [1], [6] or Eucalyptus [7]) can provide on demand instantiation, monitoring, and live migration of VMs. In this manner, fault tolerance and scalability are provided. Another important point to keep in mind is the power consumption of the computers [8]. According to [9], datacenters now drive more in carbon emissions than both Argentina and the Netherlands. So, cloud infrastructures should be managed trying to reduce the power consumption of the computers, along with keeping efficient processing and utilization of machines. In order to achieve these, load forecasting methods are needed [10] [8]. Furthermore, e-learning technologies are aimed at providing learning capabilities by means of technological infrastructures (e.g. students connected to servers through the Internet). For a large-sized distance university, such as the Spanish National University for Distance Education [11] (UNED, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia), with more than 200,000 students, 1,500 lecturers, and 2,000 administrative staff, the cloud seems to be the right paradigm to efficiently manage its technological infrastructure. This efficiency is especially needed by UNED since this is a distance university (no face-to-face classes are provided), hence it relies on its technological facilities to deal with students, keep track of them, and provide them with the access to lecturers and academic resources. UNED is working on harnessing cloud technology for its e-learning purposes, and this paper presents the directions being followed. Therefore, two directions are presented in this paper. These are the development of (1) a virtualized environment to allow students to do practical exercises easily in the field of networks and communications; and (2) techniques to predict the load of the technological infrastructures of UNED, so that users receive Quality of Service (QoS) while power consumption of computers is minimized. This paper is structured as follows: Section II provides related work in the fields of cloud computing and e-learning. Section III explains the specific necessities of UNED. Sections IV presents the main contributions of this paper, mentioned above. Finally, Section V concludes the paper and presents guidelines for future work. II. RELATED WORK The combination of cloud technologies and e-learning has been scarcely explored. The most promising works are reviewed in this section. References [12], [10] propose an e- learning framework whose infrastructure relies on cloud 978-1-61284-641-5/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE 2011 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON) – "Learning Environments and Ecosystems in Engineering Education" April 4 - 6, 2010, Amman, Jordan Page 412