Quality of Service Requirements for the e-learning Grid

In the same way that the Web has evolved from being a technology designed to aid scientific collaboration to one which is employed extensively in e-business and increasingly in e-learning, the Grid is also evolving from its original concept as a highly distributed dynamic source of computing resources “on tap”, like the power grid, for e-science, to a means of supporting enterprise computing across heterogeneous, distributed, virtual organisations. However, even the most recent ideas associated with the Grid, as represented by the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) have not yet explicitly addressed e-learning. Considerable experience has been gained over recent years through the development, deployment and management of Distributed Learning Environments (DLEs). This paper draws upon that experience to summarise Quality of Service (QoS) for elearning, and discusses how these can be supported by the OGSA.