A Cloud-Based Experiment Platform for Computer-Based Education

The computer-based education is the most popular teaching method in universities. Maintaining an all-purpose experiment environment based on physical computers is hard because different courses need different environments. Meanwhile, hardware-related experiment is suffering from the restriction of equipment location. This paper presents a work in progress on the development of a cloud-based experiment platform. We customize an IaaS cloud for the experiment context and propose solutions for software-based experiment and hardware-related simulation respectively. For a prototype system, the virtualization efficiency and user experience are discussed. In contrast with the traditional experiment environment, the cloud-based approach is more extensible for software-based experiments and it can extend the applicable scope of laboratory equipments.