Introducing Cloud Computing Topics in Curricula

The demand for graduates with exposure in Cloud Computing is on the rise. For many educational institutions, the challenge is to decide on how to incorporate appropriate cloud-based technologies into their curricula. In this paper, we describe our design and experiences of integrating Cloud Computing components into seven third/fourth-year undergraduate-level information system, computer science, and general science courses that are related to large-scale data processing and analysis at the University of Queensland, Australia. For each course, we aimed at finding the best-available and cost-effective cloud technologies that fit well in the existing curriculum. The cloud related technologies discussed in this paper include opensource distributed computing tools such as Hadoop, Mahout, and Hive, as well as cloud services such as Windows Azure and Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2). We anticipate that our experiences will prove useful and of interest to fellow academics wanting to introduce Cloud Computing modules to existing courses.