In Sultanate of Oman, higher education institutions have devoted significant human and fiscal investments in IT to support the priorities tied to teaching and learning. However, there are still issues in current high education systems associated with high cost and inefficiency in-terms of scalability, flexibility, availability, data recovery, accessibility and security due to the growing need for IT infrastructure including servers, storage and software. Higher education institutes have to spend more on hardware and software purchasing, maintenance, upgrading and licensing. Cloud computing emerged as an Internet based solution, whereby computing resources are provided to consumers and organizations as services on demand on pay per use bases. Cloud computing provides higher education information delivery, communication and collaboration. It enables the education organizations to scale their IT infrastructure while reducing the administrative burden. Cloud computing facilitates greater levels of provisioning and automation in cost effective manner. However, still there are some issues regarding to security, privacy and trust that acts as a barrier against full adoption of cloud computing in higher education. Throughout this paper we identify the cloud offerings, issues and strategy of implementation.
Higher education institutions and their engineering departments have a vital role in fulfilling the new requirements and opportunities of the information and communication technologies (ICT). Therefore, understanding the guidelines to adapt to the new ICT innovations in relation with the Fourth Industrial Revolution such as the internet of things, cloud computing, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence is vital to determine the emerging patterns in their development, delivery, implementation, and assessment. This study aims to define the new educational requirements in engineering education based on the developments of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Conducting an in-depth analysis of the current literature revealed that although these emerging technologies have been widely used, there are some challenges being faced for their effective use in engineering education. Therefore, the authors provide some guidelines and discuss possible research directions for the use of these technologies in near future.
This study is conducted to investigate experts’ views to determine the Omani higher education institutions readiness and deployment of IPv6. In particular, the study aims to assess the institutional awareness, current environment, policy, planning, and resources. Descriptive method was followed and two study instruments were designed and implemented, namely questionnaire and semi structured interviews. Both instruments were validated and implemented on a sample of (12) experts for the questionnaire and (5) for the interviews. The results revealed that IPv6 was not sufficiently attended to by the Omani HEIs and it is partially planned for, implemented, and/or deployed. Efforts should be made to help establishing strategies, research and teaching content. Based on the findings of the research, conclusions and recommendations are suggested.
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