New Instructional Models for Building Effective Curricula on Cloud Computing Technologies and Engineering

Abstract

This paper presents ongoing work to develop advanced education and training course on the Cloud Computing technologies foundation and engineering by a cooperating group of universities and the professional education partners. The central part of proposed approach is the Common Body of Knowledge in Cloud Computing (CBK-CC) that defines the professional level of knowledge in the selected domain and allows consistent curricula structuring and profiling. The paper presents the structure of the course and explains the principles used for developing course materials, such as Bloom's Taxonomy applied for technical education, and andragogy instructional model for professional education and training. The paper explains the importance of using the strong technical foundation to build the course materials that can address interests of different categories of stakeholders and roles/responsibilities in the Cloud Computing services provisioning and operation. The paper provides a short description of summary of the used Cloud Computing related architecture concepts and models that allow consistent mapping between CBK-CC, stakeholder roles/responsibilities and required skills, explaining also importance of the requirements engineering stage that provides a context for cloud based services design. The paper refers to the ongoing development of the educational course on Cloud Computing at the University of Amsterdam, University of Stavanger and provides suggestions for building advanced online training course for IT professionals.