Advancing Learning 2018

Agility, responsiveness and cost efficiency are just but a few fundamental attributes of the "Cloud". Presently, Cloud Computing has profoundly altered the IT landscape and the future does not hint of signals begging to diverge from the present.  Over the course of the spring/summer of 2017 and winter 2018, I built and piloted a private IaaS Cloud environment at Durham College to evaluate how a Cloud solution can bolster our experiential learning engagement.

The objective of this session is to share how constructing a private IaaS cloud platform can alleviate experiential learning roadblocks within Information Technology college programs, and demonstrate how such a platform deployment can prepare IT students for the current Cloud Computing environment that's prevalent in the industry.

Challenges of such a build process included hardware resource limitations, explaining the untapped potential of the private cloud over a pure virtualized environment to stakeholders, and selecting the best CCMP (Cloud Computing Management Platform) for deployment. A critical takeaway/lesson learnt from the project was that there exist quite a gap on the knowledge of Cloud Computing technologies, among faculty and students. Realized successes included achieving a fully deployed IaaS environment capability of supporting most of the current experiential learning technology needs of program courses, a deployment that confirms to the NIST standards on Cloud Computing and max production capacity testing of the system. Application Towards Technology-enabled Learning: Provides a simplified and rapidly elastic environment for experiential learning, ideal DevOps environment, scalable research environment for students and invaluable teaching and research resource for faculty.