Cloud Computing for Teaching and Learning

Cloud-based courses are now in widespread use by universities and other educational institutions. The cloud-based approach to course delivery is now used to provide scalable, granular educational content and training to millions of students asynchronously and synchronously in an innovative, effective manner. In the case of universities, more variables are under their control, such as student enrollment and student use of course elements. For universities with a focus on STEM-related programs, courses are offered to multiple categories of students with a mix of face-to-face and distance learning approaches, and the courses are often also open to the general public under different contracts. These universities typically aim to offer specially designed programs to companies and the general public who have diverse requirements and challenges. Aided by advances in cloud computing platforms, STEM focused-educational programs are increasingly adopting cloud-based learning systems to meet the diverse needs of their students. In this chapter, we discuss the motivation behind leveraging the cloud for STEM based higher education. We use the case study approach and examine two cases. The first is a large private university with 18,000 students and the second is a for-profit private educational company offering courses mainly to the general public. We examine best practices that are involved in developing such systems, progressive delivery mechanisms for course presentations, setting up the required cloud infrastructure and the operational use of the entire system. The aim is to give researchers and developers deeper insights into the development of successful private cloud-based STEM-based educational offerings.