Towards E-Learning Grids: Using Grid Computing in Electronic Learning

E-learning has been a topic of increasing interest in recent years, due mainly to the fact that increased scheduling flexibility as well as tool support can now be offered at a widely affordable level. As a result, many e-learning platforms and systems have been developed and commercialized; these are based on client-server, peer-to-peer, or, more recently, Web service architectures, with a major drawback being their limitations in scalability, availability, and distribution of computing power as well as storage capabilities. This paper tries to remedy this situation by proposing the use of grid computing in the context of e-learning. In particular, it is shown what advantages a utilization of grid computing may have to offer and which applications could benefit from it. Moreover, an architecture for an e-learning grid is outlined, and the notion of a grid learning object is introduced.