A Methodology Approach to Evaluate Cloud-Based Infrastructures in Support for e-Assessment

Abstract

In the last decade, cloud development has grown exponentially and increasingly companies, administrative and educational institutions decide to make the leap and turn their solutions to a cloud platform. In particular, cloud technologies are applicable to educational contexts, especially in online learning, as online universities historically have their educational services installed on-premises, but the trend is to move them to the cloud. This is mainly because of the evident non-functional benefits of using cloud-based solutions, such as high availability, scalability and real-time responsiveness, which are impossible or too much costly to be achieved on-premises Indeed, these benefits can effectively support the current broad and demanding educational services, such as document sharing, communication, assessment, administrative procedures and reporting tools, which must be available to an increasing number of students and university staff anytime and anywhere. However, from the architectural point of view, cloud-based systems pose some challenges not existing in traditional on-premises systems, such as modularization and separation of services, which require additional work to guarantee performance and data protection against potential risks. In this paper, we focus on the assessment services provided by an innovative cloud-based educational system named TeSLA, which may reduce considerably the university costs and infrastructure maintenance, while offering flexible and effective e-assessment solutions. The ultimate goal of the paper is to propose a methodology to evaluate the TeSLA system from the underlying cloud infrastructure in terms of non-functional requirements.