Work-in-progress: Utilization of cloud technologies in an E-learning system during campus-wide failure situation

Due to the ongoing fight situation in Syria, most of the private universities around the capital Damascus had to abandon their campuses and move to safer locations inside the city. In the case of the authors the new place was not equipped with any system for enabling the delivery of course contents over the Internet. Further more, university administration did not have the will to invest in establishing an e-learning system in the new place due to the high cost and uncertainty of continuity. The only good thing was that Internet was still working in most areas. So the teaching staff thought of using the free storage service offered by a number of providers on the WEB for hosting course contents as a start. This worked well, but it did not fulfill all necessary functions. Therefore, we started working on a new system utilizing Cloud Computing for managing courses. The new system utilizes a "Platform as a Service" model offered for free on the WEB to enable distributing course materials electronically as a first step, and is intended to perform more function gradually.