E-Assessment Cloud Solution: Architecture, Organization and Cost Model

Marjan Gusev,Goce Arminski,Krste Bozinoski,Sasko Ristov,Goran Velkoski

doi:10.3991/ijet.v8is2.2783

Abstract

Several challenges address the existing e-Assessment systems, such as accurate evaluation, security and data privacy, performance, scalability etc. Our focus in this paper is on e-Assessment scalability and performance.  We have developed a new SOA architecture of a cloud hosted e-Assessment system to achieve sustainable performance as a highly scalable and elastic solution.  The proposed organization solution is based on three modules (subsystems): management module, reporting module, and assessment module. The built in logic enables an efficient environment where minimum resources will be utilized during exploitation. The proposed system organization ensures that the assessment module, as active subsystem for each assessment, will work with much smaller data compared to the centralized one. The cost model developed for this solution analysis this cloud based solution against the existing e-Assessment web application. Therefore, we expect that this solution will have several benefits, like overall cost reduction and better performance.

Highlights

Leading organizations in e-Learning community were focused on creation of a common technical framework recently
Management module is the core of the e-Assessment system. It manages all resource provisioning in the cloud. This module can be hosted on a bare metal server or on a virtual machine (VM) with constant resources since it manages the system when it is in Inactive Mode
In order to facilitate the development of this fourth generation e-Assessment system based on cloud computing, we present the model of cloud eAssessment system with organization of VM instances that host the previously described modules and the sequence diagram that presents activities related to provision and usage of cloud resources

Summary

Introduction

Leading organizations in e-Learning community were focused on creation of a common technical framework recently. Few detailed frameworks were developed and consensus was made that e-Learning system architecture should be based on service-oriented architecture (SOA) [1]. SOA was widely adopted paradigm, and it was introduced as the architecture for the generation of eLearning systems [2]. Main benefit of this architecture is the ability to mix together services from different eLearning frameworks. SOAP and REST are two pervasive SOA paradigms for exchanging messages between web services and applications The latter is more efficient in terms of network bandwidth utilization, round-trip latency, implementation complexity and message processing overhead than the former [4], [5].

Methods

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion