Edu-Cloud: On-the-fly Employability Skills as a Service

21st Century global job market competition requires Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) university curricula to support both state-of-the-art technical and soft skills learning to improve graduate employment. This necessitates the transformation of the current teaching and learning methodology powered by a social and col- laborative platform to provide a social co-learning environment. This social co-learning will provide students with opportunities for self-enrichment while supporting their technical skills and hands-on needs. The platform must also provide the required lab infrastructure for hands-on experimentation. This paper proposes the design and implementation of a cloud based platform called Edu-Cloud. The Edu-Cloud has been designed to provide automated resource provisioning and perform on-the-fly deployment of scalable virtual network functions to stream multimedia content closer to the global learners. This would help to meet the specific learning needs of a group of global interconnected students with similar learning skills and abilities. The benchmarking performance results show that the proposed framework works efficiently while reducing primary network traffic by deploying resources closer to the users and support scalability for a global deployment scenario.