Cloud Computing in Computer Science and Engineering Education

Abstract

Cloud Computing opens a new chapter in Information Technology. It has its roots in internet technology, and like the Internet, it is rapidly and forcefully advancing into a large range of applications and services. While standardization of Cloud Computing is ongoing, there is every indication that cloud technology is here to stay and will cover most sectors of the society, including education. This paper discusses the potentials of CloudBased Education (CBE) in STEM areas to better stimulate and engage students in their pursuit of knowledge and learning. This paper introduces the concept of CloudBased Education for Computer Science (CBECS) and discusses how its framework can be achieved. Further, it shows how the platform can be generalized to use in various STEM areas. The authors argue that the potentials in using Cloud Computing for teaching Computer Science courses are extraordinary since CS has an intimate relationship with the cloud infrastructure. Thus, CBECS can greatly facilitate teaching complex underlying organizations of CS courses such as Operating Systems, Communication Networks, Cyberspace Security, WebBased Applications, Database, and High Performance Computing. While other STEM education can extensively benefit from CBE at the Software as a Service (SaaS) level to present meaningful examples in the lectures, CS courses can move deeper and utilize also the lower levels of cloud services. Such capability can deliver valuable examples and laboratories for CS students to better understand large scale applications and their complexities.

Computational literacy in science education–A systematic review

“…(a) The first criterion for excluding papers concerns publications primarily using digital tools without discussing relevance to computer science competencies: Because information technology is almost omnipresent in the 21st century, it is also more often a supportive element in STEM lessons. However, very often, there is a danger of remaining on the unreflective level from the perspective of the student (user): This situation is illustrated, for example, by Rajaei et al (2012), wherein non-computer science STEM education information technology is explicitly used as a tool and not as an object of teaching. This can be compared to claiming the use of mathematical concepts in a lesson just because a calculator.…”

Selecting cloud computing software for a virtual online laboratory supporting the Operating Systems course

“…The available works on cloud platforms for teaching operating systems describe the experience of using a wide range of tools, including cloud services given by provider and specially tailored cloud environments adapted for educational needs. Rajaei and Aldakheel [25] are convinced that the Operating Systems course is among the courses that benefit from using cloud-based environments the most. The authors suggest applying Amazon AWS instances to give students the ability to learn how different scheduling algorithms behave, how virtual memory is managed etc.…”

Analyzing of main trends of STEM education in Ukraine using stemua.science statistics

“…It means that different publishers can provide the investigation of the STEM-based content and important role in it is belongs to cloud-based education environments and the effect of them usage may be even better compare to traditional approaches in education [8; 9; 14; 46] or can create some new possibilities to provide the experiment or visualization [49]. In addition, cloud-based environments characterized by possibility to overcome the limitations of traditional classrooms [30], can provide active way of cognition [4] and may provide personaloriented education [26]. One of their advantages is possibility to find trends in the educators need by using SEO analysis results.…”