Construction of OSS-based E-Learning cloud in China

In China, e-Learning has grown into a widely accepted way of learning, and open-source software has been developed and used in many fields as well. With the huge growth of users, services, education contents and resources, the e-learning consumers and providers both have requirements to reduce the operating, development and maintenance costs. OSS-based cloud computing framework just can satisfy the requirements. In this paper, the current situation of e-learning system and their requirements in China is reviewed, a layered architecture for the e-Learning cloud is proposed, and the open-source solutions through the experiment of building a cloud computing running environment with Hadoop and converting Sakai to a SaaS application are presented. At last, the impact of open source and cloud computing to e-learning is summarized.