The Future of Education

Education is a pivotal factor in ensuring economic growth, especially for countries with growing economies such as South Africa. Today, students have become more technologically savvy as teaching and learning now employs the usage of more advance technology on a daily basis. Due to virtualize resources via the Internet, as well as dynamic scalability, cloud computing is now rapidly being adopted by other economic sectors in South Africa and its educational sector needs to follow suit. Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service-provider interaction. This paper explores how cloud computing can benefit e-learning education in South Africa. The paper further discusses the cloud computing educational environment and explore how universities and other tertiary institutions may take advantage of the cloud not only in terms of cost but also in terms of efficiency, reliability, portability, flexibility, and security. The paper also present several case studies for educational clouds introduced by popular cloud vendors such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google, which reflect the increasing interest in this new trend. Finally the paper also transverse future challenges to cloud education in general.

Keywords: Cloud Computing, Cloud Models, Education, Distance Learning, e-Learning, Learning Management System (LMS);

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