Although web-based learning has a lot of advantages over
other commonly used technologies in the field, it has its own challenges,
too. For example, due to lack of scalability at the infrastructure level, the
cost of resource management in e-learning systems has increased
significantly. Another example is how to achieve efficient resource
utilization in these systems. In addition to dealing with these challenges,
other costs should be incurred to provide e-learning services, such as
maintenance cost of website, and the associated costs with installation
and technical support of software packages. In this paper, we discuss that
designing e-learning systems based on cloud computing models is an
appropriate approach to dealing with the mentioned challenges. To this
end, after an introduction to cloud computing models, we design the
architecture of an e-learning system based on the models. Then, we
implement the proposed architecture using CloudSim as a simulation
tool to evaluate the efficiency of the system. The results demonstrate that
by taking the proposed approach, while the system achieves an efficient
resource utilization, the scalability of e-learning services increases as
well.