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Facilitating access to course contents during war situation with M-Learning and Cloud Computing technologies
Abstract
As a result of the war situation in Syria, several private universities had to completely close their campuses and move into safer places inside the capital city Damascus. This huge step made it possible to keep the educational process going on at these universities. However, in the new places even small tasks like commuting and distributing the course materials were still challenging. To address the second issue, we thought of utilizing “Cloud-Computing” technology to store these materials. Students possessing computers were able to download lectures and upload reports. However, this did not work as expected with the students wishing to use their mobile devices. For this reason, we decided to expand the system with “Mobile-Learning” technology to support a wider range of devices.
... The first implementation documented in 2010 offered an enhanced e-Learning ecosystem based on the integration between CC and Web 2.0 [214]. Other researchers have documented their experiences when developing e-learning systems (5/43) [185,190,209,214,217], m-learning systems (mobile) (5/43) [198,202,205,208,210], and virtual laboratory systems (4/43) [186,187,201,204]. In addition to these studies (30/43) [188, 189, 191-197, 199, 200, 203, 206, 207, 211-213, 215, 216, 218, 219, 221-226], other researches have shared considerably in common and highlighted issues, such as computer-supported collaborative learning platform [224], ontology-driven systems [203], SaaS platform [197], and private clouds [215]. ...
... To conclude, the current investigation shows that there are few reports on virtual laboratory systems [186,187,201,204] (9.3 %), m-learning systems (11.6%) [198,202,205,208,210], and e-learning systems (11.6%) [185,190,209,214,217]. ...
... Reports on elearning Systems [185,190,209,214,217] Reports on m-Learning Systems [198,202,205,208,210] Reports on Virtual Laboratory Systems [186,187,201,204] Others [188, 189, 191-197, 199, 200, 203, 206, 207, 211-213, 215, 216, 218, 219, 221-226] [227] undertaken at Khalifa University used the mobile technology "Moodle" to analyze the enhancement of CC on the traditional mobile learning experience. ...
Cloud computing (CC) is a recently developed computing paradigm that can be utilized to deliver everything-as-a-service to various businesses. In higher education institutions (HEIs), CC is rapidly being deployed and becoming an integral part of institution experience. CC adoption in HEIs is accompanied by numerous scientific contributions that address the topic from different perspectives. A systematic review of these heterogeneous contributions, which provide a coherent taxonomy, can be considered interesting for HEIs to identify opportunities to use CC in its own context. Therefore, this systematic literature review aims to analyze existing research on adopting and using CC in HEIs, review background research to develop a coherent taxonomy and provide a landscape for future research on CC in HEIs. The outcomes of this study include a coherent taxonomy and an overview of the basic characteristics of this emerging field in terms of motivation and barriers of adopting CC in HEIs, existing individual and organizational theoretical models to understand the future requirements for extensively adopting and using CC in HEIs, and factors that influence the adoption of CC in HEIs at individual and organizational levels. Considerable information is available in relation to adopting and using CC in HEIs. This review will enhance this information by offering an in-depth analysis of the existing data to bridge any gap and expand on existing literature.
... We found that it was possible to use Drive API and the credentials on GAE to access the contents directly from applications installed on computers or mobile devices. This triggered the idea of developing a mobile application and integrating it with CMS-mini [16]. Several published papers introduce approaches to integrating mobile technologies for facilitating education as in Ref. [11]. ...
... The instructor imports the description of the course and the information of the participants from XML files prepared in IMS Enterprise format (supported by the SIS). 2. In order to shorten the simulation time (supposed to be 16 weeks long for one semester), the traffic of one week was reflected in 1.5 days making the total simulation time 24 days. With this arrangement, we can be sure that the performance figures we get are bigger than the actual ones (in terms of traffic) within one day and therefore future designs implementing these figures should be fine. ...
While preparing for the publishing of this paper the armed conflict in Syria entered its 5th year. This conflict had severely affected all aspect of life in this country, but nothing was completely devastated. The educational system is one example that could so far survive this situation despite all difficulties and destruction. However, during such crisis even a simple issue like commuting to/from the school is very difficult, and this in turn affects the attendance rate and delivery of educational materials. In this regard, several approaches involving different technologies to ease access to materials have been tested. The results show that certain technology combinations are very useful and have the potential to serve large-scale systems when fully adopted.
Hands-on experiments are essential for computer network security education. Existing laboratory solutions usually require significant effort to build, configure, and maintain and often do not support reconfigurability, flexibility, and scalability. This paper presents a cloud-based virtual laboratory education platform called V-Lab that provides a contained experimental environment for hands-on experiments using virtualization technologies (such as Xen or KVM Cloud Platform) and OpenFlow switches. The system can be securely accessed through OpenVPN, and students can remotely control the virtual machines (VMs) and perform the experimental tasks. The V-Lab platform also offers an interactive Web GUI for resource management and a social site for knowledge sharing and contribution. By using a flexible and configurable design, V-Lab integrates pedagogical models into curriculum design and provides a progressive learning path with a series of experiments for network security education. Since summer 2011, V-Lab has served more than 1000 students from six courses across over 20 experiments. The evaluation demonstrates that the platform and curriculum have produced excellent results and helped students understand and build up computer security knowledge to solve real-world problems.
With the advent internet in the 1990s to the present day facilities of ubiquitous computing, the internet has changed the computing world in a drastic way. It has traveled from the concept of parallel computing to distributed computing to grid computing and recently to cloud computing. Although the idea of cloud computing has been around for quite some time, it is an emerging field of computer science. Cloud computing can be defined as a computing environment where computing needs by one party can be outsourced to another party and when need be arise to use the computing power or resources like database or emails, they can access them via internet. Cloud computing is a recent trend in IT that moves computing and data away from desktop and portable PCs into large data centers. The main advantage of cloud computing is that customers do not have to pay for infrastructure, its installation, required man power to handle such infrastructure and maintenance. In this paper we will discuss what makes all this possible, what is the architectural design of cloud computing and its applications.
Due to the ongoing fight situation in Syria, most of the private universities around the capital Damascus had to abandon their campuses and move to safer locations inside the city. In the case of the authors the new place was not equipped with any system for enabling the delivery of course contents over the Internet. Further more, university administration did not have the will to invest in establishing an e-learning system in the new place due to the high cost and uncertainty of continuity. The only good thing was that Internet was still working in most areas.
So the teaching staff thought of using the free storage service offered by a number of providers on the WEB for hosting course contents as a start. This worked well, but it did not fulfill all necessary functions. Therefore, we started working on a new system utilizing Cloud Computing for managing courses. The new
system utilizes a "Platform as a Service" model offered for free on the WEB to enable distributing course materials electronically as a first step, and is intended to perform more function gradually.
In this research we develop a mobile-based learning system for Japanese language based on smart devices such as Apple iPhone and iPad. The research also utilizes machine learning techniques for facial recognition to understand the learners' conditions and respond with an appropriate learning recommendations that can fit with the learners' current condition.
On-line laboratories (virtual or remote) are widely used in experimental engineering subjects as part of the learning process. In order to develop these laboratories, a development framework called RELATED (Remote Laboratories exTendED) is used by the Communications and Control System Department of the Spanish University for Distance Education of Spain (UNED). This framework defines a structured and methodological development procedure, allowing the students the generation of their own laboratories. Once the laboratory is developed (based in its components), students have to configure their own computing resources in order to make their labs available. However, several problems must be faced by students in the “deployment” of their labs: network configuration, hardware availability, and so on. So, in order to solve these problems, an automatic system based on cloud providers is defined to allow students having their own cloud network/resources for their developed labs. This system simplifies the lab deployment and avoids common errors/mistakes in the development of laboratories with RELATED.
Cyber education is an emerged term for the new approach of teaching and learning. It is a general term for e-learning and refers to web based learning. Various technologies have been applied in order to support and enrich the usage of e-learning. Recently, research has focused on building collaborative and interactive e-learning systems. Cloud computing is increasingly providing the underlying technology that supports, and hosts such systems. This paper provides a review of some proposed cloud-based e-learning initiatives along with the expected benefits and challenges. Based on the review, a future vision of e-learning is given.
The need for scheduling appears wherever the number of users in any system exceeds the number of its resources. This can be applied to any educational or training-delivery institution where the users are the students and the resources are the laboratory equipments, for example. While some institutions decided to buy or design their own scheduling systems, we thought that web-tools have enormous potential for this purpose. To demonstrate our idea, we describe in this contribution the design and prototype implementation of a scheduling system that uses Google Calendar™ for managing access to the resources in the web-based laboratory that we designed for supporting Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) courses and linked with Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment. This system allows learners to reserve a timeslot for themselves whenever they do not find a free resource to use immediately. It also registers access to the laboratory facilities allowing instructors to collect data on the resource utilization and learners behavior.
Wireless data communications in form of Short Message Service (SMS) and Wireless Access Protocols (WAP) browsers have gained global popularity, yet, not much has been done to extend the usage of these devices in electronic learning (e-learning) and information sharing. This project explores the extension of e learning into wireless/ handheld (W/H) computing devices with the help of a mobile learning (m-learning) framework. This framework provides the requirements to develop m-learning application that can be used to share academic and administrative information among people within the university campus. A prototype application has been developed to demonstrate the important functionality of the proposed system in simulated environment. This system is supposed to work both in bulk SMS and interactive SMS delivery mode. Here we have combined both Short Message Service (SMS) and Wireless Access Protocols (WAP) browsers. SMS is used for Short and in time information delivery and WAP is used for detailed information delivery like course content, training material, interactive evolution tests etc. The push model is used for sending personalized multicasting messages to a group of mobile users with a common profile thereby improving the effectiveness and usefulness of the cntent delivered. Again pull mechanism can be applied for sending information as SMS when requested by end user in interactive SMS delivery mode. The main strength of the system is that, the actual SMS delivery application can be hosted on a mobile device, which can operate even when the device is on move.
What Is Google App Engine?" [Online] Available: https
- Google Inc
Google Inc. (2014, May 21). "What Is Google App Engine?" [Online].
Available:
https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/whatisgoogleappengine