Abstract:

On March 11th, 2011, eastern Japan was affected by catastrophic earthquake and tsunami. Especially, the east coast of eastern Japan was suffered severe damage from the resulting tsunami. Western Japan is predicted that the Nankai earthquake will happen within the next 30 years, and the likelihood of its occurrence is between 70 and 80 percent. In addition, Japan has also encountered numerous bad experience that occurred as sudden serious disasters. For example, on July 5th and 6th 2017, Northern Kyusyu region was damaged by massive floods due to concentrated heavy rainfalls. The highest observed rainfall ever recorded in 72-hour period was 616.0mm. This is a record rainfall revel, and its occurrence rate has increased over the last few years. Stories of serious disasters such as massive floods and concentrated heavy rain are not uncommon in present Japan.

Moreover, East Asia has several factors contributing to its instability for regional security. The number of launching tests were 16 times including several types of missile from the Korean Peninsula in all of 2017 year. If the missile falls back to the ground of metropolitan area, these damage reaches an almost unimaginable level. Thus, we consider that crises are becoming ever more real day by day and we must be constantly prepared for such disasters and crises by having in place effective disaster recovery and disaster risk reduction plans. This situation is also applicable to the field of information systems and educational environment.

The informationization of the educational environment in universities are making steady progress by evolutional information technology. Current educational environment cannot be realized without educational assistance system such as Learning Management System, learning and teaching e-Portfolio, and so on. The learning history of students is stored into the educational assistance system. The fact is that awareness of the importance of learning data such as learning histories and teaching histories. Today’s educational environment on universities depends on educational assistance system with information technology infrastructure. If the educational assistance system with students learning history is lost by any crises, we think it become equivalent to lost sustainability for educational activity.

In this research, we built a framework of integrated risk management. Specifically, this framework is designed to reduce and recover of damage for e-Learning environment against various types of crises, such as natural disaster and regional crisis. We built a hybrid cloud environment over the private cloud collaboration infrastructure and public cloud services. The LMS such as Moodle is built on several private cloud infrastructures.

In addition, this integrated risk management platform can get emergency warning by smartphone via cell-phone carrier. Japanese major cell-phone carriers send emergency warning to their controlled smartphone, when the crises occurred. Our platform can get these warning using a smartphone that is installed in our customized application program, and the cloud collaboration controller, which organizes our prototype platforms, allows a live-migration task for each virtual machine cooperated with the customized smartphone. As a result, we consider that the damaged organization can keep running e-Learning environments, and does not lose any stored data such as students’ learning histories.

Keywords:

e-learning, hybrid cloud, disaster risk reduction, emergency warning.