Yeah, you're right, the biggest problem is to make users interested from the beginning. That's why I'm not going to build it from scratch. My partner built a unique educational website with great content on programming, algorithms, networks and computer architecture. That content could be a starting point.
Thanks, that seems interesting. But it is only a platform for creating online educational communities, correct me if I'm wrong. I'm more thinking of a service that is a combination of great educational content with an active community, that help a student throughout the learning process.
I think of it as a open-for-all online university, in the beginning at least for Russian speaking students as I have access to many Russian universities and professors who might like to participate.
Regarding the problem of schoolkids misusing the community to solve their homework, if the project is targeted for people who really want to learn something, doing so is cheating themselves. Also, for university students I believe the effect of this problem is not so evident as in middle schools.
Given real conditions that the minimal slot for VM is a 256MB RAM instance, with a physical server having 64 such slots, the educated guess is that the distribution might be similar to the normal distribution with a centre of a 2-slot VM, as 512MB VM is the most popular choice on our target market.
We have 3 servers each of 4 slots, below is the state of each server (the state of a server is a set of VMs it's running)
[3], [2, 1] and [2].
Say we need to place a new 3-slot VM to our system.
We'll pick the third server as less-loaded and try to accomodate the second server. Together they have enough space, but we can't provision the VM withour using all 3 servers. The solution here is
http://smart.fm – a next generation learning platform from Japan featuring personalized learning techniques.
http://grockit.com – a social learning tool to help students prepare for SAT, GMAT, etc. With elements of a social game.