Learning Environment as a Service (LEaaS): Cloud

Developing countries like India are suffering from acute shortage of investment in education sector. A major portion of investment is used for setting up IT infrastructure like computer labs or experimental work-shops. The virtualization technology in this modern era can eradicate this expenditure reality. This paper proposes an idea called Learning Environment as a Service (LEaaS) using cloud computing, so that the students can make use of virtual labs provided by the institutional cloud server. This reduces the overhead in setting up different labs and also brings down students' expenditure at home for practising their experiments. This idea provides a flexible, economical and mobile learning environment. The proposed idea leverages the possibilities of cloud computing in reducing the cost of setting up a learning environment, the running cost and cost of human resources for management in an institution. It also alleviates the problems concerned with the infrastructure complexity, maintenance overhead and resource allocation. Here we illustrate an architecture that can be used as an efficient model for building and maintaining a virtual lab framework. In our experiment, we have deployed a cloud platform using CloudStack and XenServer as the major tools at the server side. The client can use thin client technology.