Security considerations and reference architecture of a cyber computing infrastructure for online education

The world of online education is gaining momentum as evidenced by the stamp of approval from accreditation agencies and increasing number of online course offerings from top-tier universities. Learning Management Systems have kept up with the needs of online education by providing an online experience comparable to face-to-face lectures. Besides lectures, one of the major services offered by a traditional brick and mortar university is computing resources for students and faculty. To keep parity between the computing services offered by traditional educational campus environments and online educational environments, it is necessary to offer sufficient computing resources to the online students & cyber-faculty. The reference architecture and security considerations for such a Cyber Computing Infrastructure is laid out in this paper. We present an implementation of a Cyber Computing Infrastructure based on these principles to elucidate the alignment of the elements with practical implementation. Surveys conducted with end users of the implemented infrastructure showed very high satisfaction rate among students and faculty.