=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=None
|storemode=property
|title=Measuring Emotional Responses to Experiences with Cloud-based Learning Activities
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-945/paper11.pdf
|volume=Vol-945
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/ltec/RizzardiniA12
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==Measuring Emotional Responses to Experiences with Cloud-based Learning Activities==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-945/paper11.pdf
1st International Workshop on Cloud Education Environments (WCLOUD 2012)
Measuring emotional responses to experiences with Cloud-based learning activities
Rocael Hernandez Rizzardini Hector Amado
GES department, GES department,
Galileo University, Galileo University,
Guatemala, Guatemala Guatemala, Guatemala
roc@galileo.edu hr_amado@galileo.edu
Abstract— Cloud Education Environments consider all the Cloud computing application technologies are a major
cloud services, whether they are applications, content technological trend that is shifting business models and
providers, infrastructure services, as large ecosystem that can application paradigms; the cloud can provide on-demand
be used as an e-Learning ecosystem which can be built upon services through applications served over the Internet for
the learning objectives of a course. Any web 2.0 application
multiple set of devices in a dynamic and very scalable
might be used for learning purposes, and many of those
applications that reside on the cloud have already opened the environment [7]. Thus, the significance of the technology
APIs for having an orchestrated integration of them. In this for this study lies not only in cloud computing, but in the
paper we present the design and deployment of learning application that reside in the cloud that can be used for
activities using cloud applications and services. The learning purposes, although as it will be presented, many of
experiences presented here are from Galileo University in them have not been intended for learning in the first place,
Guatemala, with students from three different countries in the applications used in this case study are actually used for
Central America and Spain. In this study we present results of learning. Likewise social networking technologies provide
an instrument that measured emotional aspects and opinions easy pathways for sharing these kinds of cloud applications
about the tools and cloud-based learning activities. Several
and their related data and activities and of course for
cloud-based tools were used for the different learning activities
required for the courses, some featuring collaborative actions, socializing and possible collaborative experiences at the
knowledge representation and schemes, publication of same time. [8]
information, research activities, storytelling activities and
social networking. The results obtained demonstrates that We aim to create a Cloud Education Environment, where a
students are eager to use and have new and more interactive vast amount of possible tools and services can be used,
ways of learning, that challenges their creativity and group connected and in the future orchestrated for learning and
organization skills, while professors have a growing interest on teaching. [9]
using new tools and resources that are easy to use, mix and
reuse.
Cloud-based tools, Cloud Learning Activities, Cloud
II. THE EXPERIENCE
Education Environments, Web 2.0, Social Networking, e-
Learning. A. The Galileo University Test-bed
In this section we present our cloud-based learning
I. INTRODUCTION experience in Latin-American countries following other
successful experiences [2][3].
There is great potential to maximize innovation through the The experience happens in the Institute Von Neumann
use of multiple cloud-based tools for learning activities and (IVN) of Galileo University, Guatemala. IVN is an online
to create a new learning environment, applications, and higher education institute. It delivers online educational
learning experiences. Therefore there is a tendency that programs across the country and those programs are open for
Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) will move from a other countries.
monolithic paradigm to a distributed paradigm. Some call it B. Experience description
the next generation of cloud-based e-Learning environment
The student population at IVN is mostly adult learners who
[1][2][3]. It is clear that VLE need to be more scalable and
have a job; this is something quite common in the entire
improve the real innovation they bring to education, but University students. The courses are similar to any other
actual work has a focus on infrastructure layer rather than University course; most of the students do their learning
application layer [4][5]. Still VLE is a simple conversion of during the evening or in weekends because of work.
classroom-based content to an electronic format, retaining It is a complete online learning degree, the topic of the
its traditional knowledge-centric structure. [6] 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
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1st International Workshop on Cloud Education Environments (WCLOUD 2012)
asynchronous sessions, although the use of chat with design of the activity, the professor and instructional
professor and other peers is possible, and students are designer proceed to select the most suitable tool based on
expected to work 10 hours/week for studying materials, previous knowledge and experience with the tool, in the
doing learning activities and doing collaborative activities. presented experience most of the proposed tool has been
The courses within the e-Learning certification are designed already used for other learning activities in other courses.
in learning units that usually last for 1 week each unit
having a diversity of online material such as video, audio, Course 2 “Introduction to e-Learning”, had the following
animations, interactive content, forums, assignments and a learning activities:
wide diversity of learning activities specially designed for Activity 2.1: Students had to do a research of a given topic,
enhancing learning acquisition. The course uses the then writing collaboratively an essay in groups of four
institutional LMS that currently is .LRN LMS students. This activity was prepared with a comparison
(www.dotlrn.org), although some module are alternative group setting, where we divided the whole class in three
given using Moodle. The students have the advice and help parts, first two parts using cloud-based learning activities
from professional instructional designers to build their and the last third part using traditional desktop applications.
online course. The Certification is targeted to university The first two groups were asked to use cloud services,
professors, e-Learning consultants, instructors that want to Google Docs [14] and Wiki Spaces [15] and one of the
enhance their knowledge about teaching with technology. group used traditional word processor. Then students were
invited to represent the information with a time-line tool, the
The presented experience has two groups of more than 60 cloud-based time-line tools used were Dipity [16] and
students, most of them university professors, from different Timetoast [17] and the traditional tool was Power Point.
countries: Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Spain. Finally students had to comment and discuss about other
The courses titles are: course 2: Introduction to e-Learning; groups results in the LMS online discussion forums.
course 3: e-Moderation and course 4: Online activities The group parts used tools are describe in Table I.
design.
TABLE I. COMPARISON SETTING
In this experience, students were assigned to cloud-based Number of
Tools used for the learning activity
learning activities for the first time, most of them were not Groups
technology savvy, but they had a preliminary course that 3 Google Docs and Dipity
introduced them into the use of the institutional LMS and 3 Wiki Spaces and Timetoast
related technologies.
3 Word and PowerPoint
The course professor introduced these cloud-based learning
activities as innovative and powerful tools for learning, with Activity 2.2: Students had to do a research and present
the objective to elaborate all the benefits that can create knowledge gained through mind map tools, the cloud
mindset change, guiding the students through the benefits application used were MindMeister [18] and Cacoo [19].
that these type of activities will have in their learning Finally they were invited to discuss about other peer
process [3], something that proved to be very helpful to contributions on the LMS forum. It was designed as an
avoid resistance and possible fear to new and seen as individual activity.
complex tools. We collected information form students in a Also a comparison setting is presented in Table II.
pre-test and post-test through an online survey. Each group
TABLE II. COMPARISON SETTING
did two four-week courses, between the courses there was a
one-week off that we used to do telephone interviews and Number of
Tools used for the learning activity
Students
gather further information about the experience.
10 Cacoo
C. The Learning Activities and Scenarios
10 Mindmeister
We designed learning activities based on instructional
16 PowerPoint
objectives, using as a base the past standard non-cloud-
based activities from previous editions of the courses, and
transforming them to leverage the potential of the cloud Course 3: “e-Moderation”, had the following activities:
ecosystem. The designed and tested activities are presented, Activity 3.1: Students had to synthetize information learned
it is important to mention that each activity was carefully in the course and publish it using the cloud-tool Issuu [20].
designed using a custom made instructional design template Then discuss other peer contribution on LMS forums.
that contains all activity related information such as:
learning objectives, instructions, classification using Activity 3.2: Students had to do a research, create a
Bloom’s revised taxonomy [1] and grading. Each single step storytelling script and represent it using one of the following
on the activity has a clear and explicit grading. With a clear cloud-based tools: GoAnimate [21], Xtranormal [22], Pixton
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1st International Workshop on Cloud Education Environments (WCLOUD 2012)
[23]. Publish it in the social network Facebook [24] and “The use of new tools for learning was fun and can
comment other peers’ contributions. be applied with creativity to teach scientific
content.”
Course 4: “Online activities design”, had the following “What I liked is that I started using the tools in my
learning activities: current courses.”
Activity 4.1: the whole group of students will build a “I liked that the activities awaken creativity and
collaborative bookmarking based on a research assignment, obtained interesting results and products.”
using a base taxonomy provided by the professor to classify “The activities promote meaningful learning,
the links provided by the students. The Delicious learning by doing so you will not forget, allows
bookmarking site [25] was used for the activity. flexibility in learning and I feel very satisfying to
achieve something new and different.”
Activity 4.2: Students had to create online satisfaction “The tools used for the activities are pretty
survey for courses, synthetize a method and requirements dynamic and will make courses more interactive.”
for these types of surveys using a mind-mapping tool and
publish a sample survey using Google forms [14]. B. Negative impressions
“I needed more time to get to know the tools and
Activity 4.3: The third learning activity focused on modeling how to use it”
a process for creating visually attractive digital posters with “The work load was increased for activities within
educational intentions, first by using a mind-mapping to the new tools with an overhead with learning the
elaborate the concepts, and then reflect them in an cloud- tools”
based tool for online poster called Gloster [26]. “I needed a lot of more time to achieve the results
In all activities, students were required to learn about the with tools like Gloster, and I felt frustrated”
tool in order to perform their assignments. “The instructions were not clear”
“With some of the tools you need to purchase a
D. Instruments Used membership to upgrade and enable some
We used standardized instruments to measure this functionality”
experience [10,11,12,13], through online surveys sent to the “Some of the tools are not accessible and you can’t
students with a pre-test and post-test that measured use it in all operating systems, e.g. Flash based
emotional aspects and opinions about the tools and cloud- tools”
based learning activities. Pre and post-test were evaluated C. Emotional aspects evaluation
with instructional designers, professors and students to
observe and verify its validity, some enhancements were
In the experience evaluation the results of the pre-test
introduced after conducting an interview with survey testers. showed about the motivation, the instrument was based on
the Computer Emotion Scale (4pt. scale) [12] developed by
III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION OF THE EXPERIENCE Kay and Loverock to measure emotions related to learning
new computer software/learning tools in general, then the
post-test measured the motivation after using the tool
From a total of 36 students, 25 of the students gave their proposed for the learning activities with the following
consent to participate in the study (Participation were comparison in Table III.:
equally distributed with 48% of female and 52% of male
participants, M=37, σ =14) by filling out at least one out of TABLE III. COMPUTER EMOTION SCALE COMPARISON
the two presented questionnaires. Participants were asked Emotion Pre-test results Post-test results
about the experience and some of the more interesting Satisfied 2.50 (σ = 0.65) 2.48 (σ = 0.65)
positive and negative impressions are presented with the Anxious 1.42 (σ = 0.97) 1.24 (σ = 0.78)
emotional aspects evaluation: Irritable 0.28 (σ = 0.45) 0.44 (σ = 0.51)
A. Positive impressions Excited 2.33 (σ = 0.72) 2.16 (σ = 0.85)
Dispirited 0.31 (σ = 0.47) 0.28 (σ = 0.46)
“I liked to know new activities and tools in the web Helpless 0.47 (σ = 0.56) 0.52 (σ = 0.65)
for more interaction with the student” Frustrated 0.39 (σ = 0.55) 0.32 (σ = 0.56)
“I learned about many great tools that will help me Curious 2.33 (σ = 0.68) 2.12 (σ = 0.83)
with my teaching activities, the experience showed Nervous 0.47 (σ = 0.56) 0.60 (σ = 0.65)
me that the activities can be very interactive and Disheartened 0.32 (σ = 0.42) 0.35 (σ = 0.46)
innovative” Angry 0.19 (σ = 0.40) 0.32 (σ = 0.48)
Insecure 0.47 (σ = 0.70) 0.40 (σ = 0.58)
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1st International Workshop on Cloud Education Environments (WCLOUD 2012)
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IV. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK
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ACKNOWLEDGMENT [23] Pixton. Tool available online: www.pixton.com [last visit 24-09-
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[24] Facebook. Tool available online: www.facebook.com [last visit 24-
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[26] Gloster. Tool available online: www.gloster.com [last visit 24-09-
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