Title: Experiences in teaching virtualisation with private cloud platform

Authors: Kun Ma; Bo Yang

Addresses: Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Network Based Intelligent Computing, University of Jinan, Jinan 250022, Shandong, China ' Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Network Based Intelligent Computing, University of Jinan, Jinan 250022, Shandong, China

Abstract: Many universities are now offering courses that cover virtualisation related to cloud computing techniques. However, they have ignored the change in economic billing models caused by cloud computing. In our paper, we describe our experiences teaching virtualisation in an introductory curriculum to computers and network using the private cloud platform we developed. With this platform, every student could carry out labs and projects on the virtual machines, which would have been impossible otherwise. Over the past two years, our experience was a success overall. Each student has learnt pay-as-you-go billing models and some related virtualisation technology in the experiments. Furthermore, some reminders of the platform sufficiently prevent students from overspending. Average per-pupil expenses in the cloud were under CNY 100. Two labs and one project are designed to help the students to complete the assignment excitedly. As shown on the survey, 87% said they thought it should be retained in future course offerings.

Keywords: virtualisation; virtual machines; higher education; overspending; cloud computing; computing education; pay-as-you-go billing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCEELL.2015.072668

International Journal of Continuing Engineering Education and Life-Long Learning, 2015 Vol.25 No.3, pp.301 - 314

Received: 18 Jul 2013
Accepted: 24 Jun 2014
Published online: 23 Oct 2015 *

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