- Cloud Education Environments consider all the cloud services, whether they are applications, content providers, infrastructure services, as large ecosystem that can be used as an e-Learning ecosystem which can be built upon the learning objectives of a course. Any web 2.0 application might be used for learning purposes, and many of those applications that reside on the cloud have already opened the APIs for having an orchestrated integration of them. In this paper we present the design and deployment of learning activities using cloud applications and services. The experiences presented here are from Galileo University in Guatemala, with students from three different countries in Central America and Spain. In this study we present results of an instrument that measured emotional aspects and opinions about the tools and cloud-based learning activities. Several cloud-based tools were used for the different learning activities required for the courses, some featuring collaborative actions, knowledge representation and schemes, publication of information, research activities, storytelling activities and social networking. The results obtained demonstrates that students are eager to use and have new and more interactive ways of learning, that challenges their creativity and group organization skills, while professors have a growing interest on using new tools and resources that are easy to use, mix and reuse.
INTRODUCTION
There is great potential to maximize innovation through the
use of multiple cloud-based tools for learning activities and
to create a new learning environment, applications, and
learning experiences. Therefore there is a tendency that
Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) will move from a
monolithic paradigm to a distributed paradigm. Some call it
the next generation of cloud-based e-Learning environment
[
II.
In this section we present our cloud-based learning
experience in Latin-American countries following other
successful experiences [
The experience happens in the Institute Von Neumann (IVN) of Galileo University, Guatemala. IVN is an online higher education institute. It delivers online educational programs across the country and those programs are open for other countries.
The student population at IVN is mostly adult learners who have a job; this is something quite common in the entire University students. The courses are similar to any other University course; most of the students do their learning during the evening or in weekends because of work. It is a complete online learning degree, the topic of the course is an e-Learning certification that consists in several modules that specializes the students into e-Learning from an instructional design reference. The course do not have asynchronous sessions, although the use of chat with professor and other peers is possible, and students are expected to work 10 hours/week for studying materials, doing learning activities and doing collaborative activities. The courses within the e-Learning certification are designed in learning units that usually last for 1 week each unit having a diversity of online material such as video, audio, animations, interactive content, forums, assignments and a wide diversity of learning activities specially designed for enhancing learning acquisition. The course uses the institutional LMS that currently is .LRN LMS (www.dotlrn.org), although some module are alternative given using Moodle. The students have the advice and help from professional instructional designers to build their online course. The Certification is targeted to university professors, e-Learning consultants, instructors that want to enhance their knowledge about teaching with technology. The presented experience has two groups of more than 60 students, most of them university professors, from different countries: Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Spain. The courses titles are: course 2: Introduction to e-Learning; course 3: e-Moderation and course 4: Online activities design.
In this experience, students were assigned to cloud-based learning activities for the first time, most of them were not technology savvy, but they had a preliminary course that introduced them into the use of the institutional LMS and related technologies.
The course professor introduced these cloud-based learning
activities as innovative and powerful tools for learning, with
the objective to elaborate all the benefits that can create
mindset change, guiding the students through the benefits
that these type of activities will have in their learning
process [
We designed learning activities based on instructional
objectives, using as a base the past standard
non-cloudbased activities from previous editions of the courses, and
transforming them to leverage the potential of the cloud
ecosystem. The designed and tested activities are presented,
it is important to mention that each activity was carefully
designed using a custom made instructional design template
that contains all activity related information such as:
learning objectives, instructions, classification using
Bloom’s revised taxonomy [
Also a comparison setting is presented in Table II.
Course 3: “e-Moderation”, had the following activities:
Activity 3.1: Students had to synthetize information learned
in the course and publish it using the cloud-tool Issuu [
Course 4: “Online activities design”, had the following
learning activities:
Activity 4.1: the whole group of students will build a
collaborative bookmarking based on a research assignment,
using a base taxonomy provided by the professor to classify
the links provided by the students. The Delicious
bookmarking site [
Activity 4.2: Students had to create online satisfaction
survey for courses, synthetize a method and requirements
for these types of surveys using a mind-mapping tool and
publish a sample survey using Google forms [
In all activities, students were required to learn about the tool in order to perform their assignments.
We used standardized instruments to measure this
experience [
III.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION OF THE EXPERIENCE From a total of 36 students, 25 of the students gave their consent to participate in the study (Participation were equally distributed with 48% of female and 52% of male participants, M=37, σ =14) by filling out at least one out of the two presented questionnaires. Participants were asked about the experience and some of the more interesting positive and negative impressions are presented with the emotional aspects evaluation: A.
Positive impressions
“I liked to know new activities and tools in the web
for more interaction with the student”
“I learned about many great tools that will help me
with my teaching activities, the experience showed
me that the activities can be very interactive and
innovative”
“The use of new tools for learning was fun and can
be applied with creativity to teach scientific
content.”
“What I liked is that I started using the tools in my
current courses.”
“I liked that the activities awaken creativity and
obtained interesting results and products.”
“The activities promote meaningful learning,
learning by doing so you will not forget, allows
flexibility in learning and I feel very satisfying to
achieve something new and different.”
“The tools used for the activities are pretty
dynamic and will make courses more interactive.”
“I needed more time to get to know the tools and
how to use it”
“The work load was increased for activities within
the new tools with an overhead with learning the
tools”
“I needed a lot of more time to achieve the results
with tools like Gloster, and I felt frustrated”
“The instructions were not clear”
“With some of the tools you need to purchase a
membership to upgrade and enable some
functionality”
“Some of the tools are not accessible and you can’t
use it in all operating systems, e.g. Flash based
tools”
In the experience evaluation the results of the pre-test
showed about the motivation, the instrument was based on
the Computer Emotion Scale (4pt. scale) [
Satisfied Anxious Irritable Excited Dispirited Helpless Frustrated Curious Nervous Disheartened Angry Insecure
Pre-test results 2.50 (σ = 0.65) 1.42 (σ = 0.97) 0.28 (σ = 0.45) 2.33 (σ = 0.72) 0.31 (σ = 0.47) 0.47 (σ = 0.56) 0.39 (σ = 0.55) 2.33 (σ = 0.68) 0.47 (σ = 0.56) 0.32 (σ = 0.42) 0.19 (σ = 0.40) 0.47 (σ = 0.70)
Post-test results
2.48 (σ = 0.65)
1.24 (σ = 0.78)
0.44 (σ = 0.51)
2.16 (σ = 0.85)
0.28 (σ = 0.46)
0.52 (σ = 0.65)
0.32 (σ = 0.56)
2.12 (σ = 0.83)
0.60 (σ = 0.65)
0.35 (σ = 0.46)
0.32 (σ = 0.48)
0.40 (σ = 0.58)
The summary with the four variables of the CES [
Some of the main results of the post-test were: 35% of the participants think that it was difficult to complete the learning activities 50% of the participants think that they would need more information and instructions to complete the learning activities Only 10% of the participants expressed the
learning activities were boring 95% of the participants liked the idea to use innovative learning online tools to represent new knowledge 70% of the participants considered that the time for the activity was appropriate 80% of the participants were positive about the expression that sharing results within groups and comments about other participants helps to learn new concepts related to the activity.
IV.
The presented learning experience showed the main impressions from professors while they are doing and planning learning activities using innovative cloud-based learning tools. The impressions from participants showed the interest in this kind of activities highlighting the interaction, innovation, flexibility and creativity.
Still there are many open questions that will be explored about the experience with measures of previous experiences, motivation, usability and new cloud-based learning tools.
This works was prepared thanks to our group of researchers, e-tutors and instructional designers for collaborating enthusiastically during the experimentation.