The development of cloud computing resources and their implementation in university education require an increase in the ICT-competence of future computer science teachers. The article considers the use of project method as an effective tool of encouraging students' cooperation while solving practical problems and as a means of developing their essential professional skills. The following pedagogical approaches and techniques were used: partnership of group members, development of group work skills, heterogeneous grouping, combined use of individual and peer assessment, teacher's monitoring of the students' work, focus on the task and group work skills, chance for every member to be a leader, essential feedback. The authors suggest using private and public cloud technologies to support the implementation of group methodology in the teaching process. One of such technologies is academic cloud based on the Apache CloudStack platform. This cloud environment is deployed in Physics and Mathematics Department of Ternopil V. Hnatiuk National Pedagogical University. The suggested method has been verified experimentally by using Wilcoxon signed-rank test.
The educational reform which is currently under way in Ukraine among its many priorities calls for the urgent implementation of effective modern teaching technologies in the system of training competitive specialists. One of the ways to rise to a new level of the education quality is the use of cloud technologies, development of education clouds in Ukraine’s universities in particular.
According to extensive research in the field, the problem of creating cloud-oriented environment in higher educational institutions is still relevant. The issues relating to the implementation of cloud technologies in education have been explored by V. Bykov, O. Glazunova, N. Morse, S. Lytvinova, O. Spirin, M. Shishkina, A. Alkhansa, A.A. Shakeabubakor, E. Sundararajan, A. Hamdan and others.
Yu. Nosenko’s paper [
"Academic cloud" of a university is a cloud-oriented environment of an
educational institution which combines hardware, software and information resources and
services, functions on the basis of technologies of cloud computing and provides the
academic process with the resources of the university local network and Internet
access [
The goal of this article is to research effectiveness of group methodology of training future teachers of computer science in university cloud-oriented environment. 2
The cloud-oriented environment [14; 1] defined above was used for the development of component methodology designed for the instruction of prospective computer science teachers. In particular, we focused on the formation of professional and technology components of ICT competencies. These competencies reflect the professional qualifications of the future teacher. For computer science teachers it is necessary to determine those competencies that are directly related to their profession and cover the content of the school ICT syllabus.
The technology competencies of computer science teachers may be subdivided into
two groups [
We used project work as the main method of instruction. A project is a task or
problem which commonly engages a group of students and supplements traditional
classroom studies. The notion of "project" encompasses different activities characterized
by a number of common features [
Project work is aimed at formation of professional qualifications and skills, development of study habits and need for continuous learning, as well as practical application of the acquired knowledge.
The project under study involved first-year students majoring in "Pedagogical education. ICT, Mathematics, Physics". To cope with the tasks, the students were supposed to have basic knowledge of the following disciplines: Operating Systems, Computer Architecture and Software. The students had one week to complete all the tasks. The focus of the study was computer training. The project consisted of several practical tasks, complex in nature. Students worked in groups, each group having the same tasks to do. Our hypothesis was that conditions favorable for the increase in the student motivation can be created in the process of group work. However, interaction of group members does not guarantee the formation of the desired set of educational motives.
The researchers distinguish between three possible levels of relations depending on
the type of students’ interdependence in the group: weak, medium and strong [
Group work in the classroom may occasionally result in cases of negative
interdependence, which in its turn promotes students’ competitiveness [
The study demonstrated that students face problems in cooperative learning when they lack interpersonal skills, personal responsibility and the desire to achieve a common goal. Sometimes it was possible to observe a situation when more efficient students did most of the work, while the others just waited for the result. Therefore, we developed our own assessment strategy which takes into account both the contribution of each member of the group and the collective results.
Working in groups gives students a number of advantages. They do not get easily distracted and are more likely to stay focused on the given task longer than those who study individually. Students adopt a more positive attitude towards the topics they study working together rather than in individual or competitive learning environments. They are more eager to revise, broaden and increase the knowledge they have acquired. Likewise, students develop a positive attitude towards the subject and the entire educational process.
As a result of our project, the students created E-portfolios, which can serve an
instrument for measuring the quality of the learning process [
Listed below are the basic principles underlying the strategy we designed to ensure the efficient group work: ─ students are oriented towards a common goal which serves as an additional source of motivation; ─ all members of the group are taught to take responsibility for the achievements of their group mates and the whole group; ─ when one succeeds, all are winners; when one fails, all are losers; ─ the need for mutual help and support; ─ developing mutual feelings of trust and care; ─ cultivating the atmosphere of friendly and supportive relationships. As a result of positive interdependence, team members develop skills necessary for efficient cooperation. Every member of the group is expected to use these skills while working together. The focus on academic tasks, techniques to solve them and ways of cooperation favours the acquisition of skills necessary for interaction in the classroom. As part of the project, the group regularly review their performance outcomes, thus ensuring continuous progress, improving the quality of their work, contributing to the development of their cooperative skills and successful achievement of the learning goals. Effective cooperation of all group members grows into fully-fledged collaboration. All participants relate to each other and work side by side on a joint project. There is sufficient experimental evidence that such groups can cope with the tasks that individual members fail to complete. To ensure the effective work of groups, the following pedagogical approaches and techniques were used: ─ partnership of group members; ─ development of group work skills; ─ heterogeneous grouping; ─ combined use of individual and peer assessment; ─ teacher’s monitoring of the students’ work; ─ focus on the task and group work skills; ─ chance for every member to be a leader; ─ essential feedback.
Working on the project, students were asked to divide the responsibilities by taking on specific roles (table 1). By taking a certain role each student is supposed to demonstrate the behavior others can expect from him/her and a certain reaction towards other members’ behavior. generates new ideas and strategies individualist, scientifically-minded; highlighting the core issues; strives to smart and imaginative, knowledgeable bring innovation; and gifted adopts a pragmatic approach to ana- tolerant, reserved, cautious, reasonable; lyze problems, weighs the ideas for the common sense, rationality, determinagroup members to make a decision; tion; brings plans and concepts into action; realist, experienced and well-versed in makes an objective judgment of feasi- practical matters; self-disciplined, orgability of a decision; nized; systemic in approach to business; spots and communicates new ideas and conservative with a strong sense of duupdates available outside the group, ty, great communication skills, sensible, establishing external contacts; self-disciplined, inquisitive, sociable; Supervisor encourages the team members to per- capable of completing tasks, scrupulous sist and maintain the purpose, takes and demanding; diligent and accurate in effort to eliminate mistakes carrying out tasks; Team coordinates the work of group mem- kind, sensitive, ready to meet the needs worker bers; offers help in difficulties, keeps of the group members, creates friendly up the team spirit atmosphere
Although in many cases the above mentioned roles are conventional, they help teachers and group members to focus on the subject matter and social elements of their work: ─ elements related to the subject matter of the task. They are necessary for the effective division of work among team members (for example, the idea man puts forward new ideas and strategies, the implementer weighs pros and cons of the solution, the supervisor strives to eliminate the mistakes); ─ social elements help team members to build effective working relationships (the promoter manages cooperation of group members, the chairperson guides the way for the group to achieve success, a team worker coordinates the work and keeps up the morale of the group members).
Our research was performed at the Joint Laboratory of the Institute of Information
Technologies and Learning Tools of the National Academy of Educational Sciences
of Ukraine, and Ternopil Volodymyr Hnatiuk National Pedagogical University [
Principles: systematic learning, openness, group work, research activities, reflection and feedback assessments.
Roles: organization, motivation, research, activity, communication, modelling.
ICT-competencies in Operating System, Computer Hardware Use of Public Clouds (Microsoft Office 365, G Suite) Use of Academic Clouds (Apache CloudStack)
Stages: prepare, problems statement, group and individual research, presentation, analyze Forms: training, ICT-practice, class group work, distance individual work Criteria: motivational, practical, productive
Indicators: stable motivation for cognition; raising the level of ICT competencies; group work skills in the clouds
Levels: high (A), medium (B, C), low (D, E) ─ discuss study-related questions in open and private groups; ─ plan and coordinate their group work; ─ create and edit educational materials of E-portfolios (diagrams, reports, brochures, leaflets, infographics); ─ access files; ─ post and share videos demonstrating problem-solving procedures; ─ give feedback.
To verify the efficiency of our methodology, we conducted an experiment involving 5 basic groups (BG) of 20 students and 5 experimental groups (EG) of 20 students. All the groups were of mixed type, i.e. with students from different departments (ICT, Mathematics, Physics). All the participants had the same task to carry out, namely, to repair computer operational system (real or virtual). Students from experimental groups used the virtual machines from the academic cloud based on CloudStack platform. Students from basic groups used real computers. The validity of the experiment was ensured by meeting the following requirements: ─ random grouping; ─ classes in basic and experimental groups were delivered by the same teacher; ─ standard system of assessment (A (90-100 points), B (85-89 points), C (75-84 points), D (65-74 points), E (60-64 points), F (less than 60 points)).
Working with real or virtual computers, students from basic and experimental groups tried to recover their operating system. They performed the following operations: ─ recovery of deleted data; ─ migration of operating systems to another hardware; ─ performance optimization of VMs and real computers; ─ recovery of operating systems after BDOS; ─ virus removal.
Taking into consideration the tasks of the project, we had the following requirements to the teaching of the experimental groups: ─ the study of information systems on the basis of their educational models – virtual computers; ─ virtual objects matching real information systems; ─ teachers and students can change the object of study to suit their personal needs; ─ unlimited access to cloud services via LAN of the educational institution and the
Internet; ─ personalized access to computational resources, preferably using single sign-on authentication.
Before the start of the project we got ready 20 virtual and 20 real computers for each student of the above-mentioned groups. It is commonly known that CloudStack platform provides possibilities to reinstall VMs and take their snapshots. So in case students from the experimental groups failed to complete the task, it was possible to start from the very beginning. User authentication was carried out in LDAP directory of Microsoft Active Directory. It allows users to use single sign-on authentication in order to access local and cloud services. Unlimited access was secured by VPN-server which also carried out authentication via LDAP. To divide participants into experimental groups a few Apache CloudStack domains and projects were used. Group leaders were assigned the role of administrators in charge of all the VMs.
Deployed cloud infrastructure contains such elements: 1 zone, 1 pod, 1 cluster, 3 hosts, 3 primary and 1 secondary storages. In our academic cloud, Apache CloudStack provides: running a large number of instances of VMs; connection of VMs through physical and virtual networks; access to VMs through web-interface and standard protocols; distribution of computing resources for VMs; creation of template and snapshot of VMs; integrated authentication based on LDAP-directory.
At the first stage of the experiment we analyzed the final marks received by the
students of the both groups in the course "Operating systems". The marks were given
on a 100-point scale. To compare the marks, we used nonparametric Mann–Whitney
U test for 2 independent samples [
Marks of both groups were combined in order of increasing. Every mark was assigned a rank. For the same marks an average value of the sum of their ranks was assigned. For both groups we calculated the rank sums (R1 for BG and R2 for EG). As a result, we got the following table: where n1 – student numbers in BG, n2 – student numbers in EG, Rx – maximum of R1 and R2. Calculated value of Uexp=189, which is more than critical 138 (for α=0.05). Uexp>Ucr. So the null hypothesis H0 that the mark distributions of both groups are equal proved to be true.
Student academic performance was assessed according to such levels of achievement: A (90-100 points), B (85-89 points), C (75-84 points), D (65-74 points), E (6064 points), F (less than 60 points). The diagram below features the results of the assessment of student performance. EG-1 EG-2 A
B
C D Levels of achievement
E At the second stage students solved practical tasks. They produced their results as group and individual portfolios. We rated works of the students on the same 100-point scale. After that we compared the grades received by students in EG (EG-1 and EG-2) at the first and second stages (fig. 3).
A
B
C D Levels of achievement
E
To verify regularity of the differences in grades at first and second stages we used the
nonparametric Wilcoxon rank sum test for 2 related samples [
The conducted research allowed us to make the following conclusions: 1. Traditional system of education too often puts students into the competition conditions, rarely preparing future professionals for work in a team in the environment of positive interdependence. 2. There are objective conditions for using group methodology in training future computer science teachers. 3. The current level of cloud technology development makes the group project training technology open and easily accessible. 4. The applying of the suggested methodology can be an effective tool in solving several problems, organizational, technological, psychological and social. Our research has experimentally proved the efficiency of the project method in training future computer science teachers. The proposed training technology raises students’ cognitive interest, allows them to develop essential professional skills, ability to work in a team and sense of responsibility for their joint effort.