Leveraging cloud environment flexibility to smoothen the transition to remote teaching during COVID-19 pandemic-a case study

Cloud-based computational environments can offer elastic and flexible services to wide audiences. Malopolska Educational Cloud was originally developed to support the day-to-day collaboration of geographically scattered schools with universities which organized online classes, led by university teachers, as an amendment to face-to-face teaching. Due to the centralized management and ubiquitous access, both the set of services provided by MEC and their usage patterns can be adjusted rapidly. In this paper we show how - during the COVID-19 pandemic - the flexibility of Malopolska Educational Cloud was leveraged to speed up the transition from in-class to remote teaching, both in the classes and schools which were already involved in the MEC project, and newly added ones. We also discuss the actions that were required to support the smooth transition and draw conclusions for the future.