Figure 1. Cloud Education
In this article the author explains how cloud education can provide reasonable and high-value education services for contemporary students, teachers, parents and administrators. Also the benefits for students and faculties by cloud education in educational institutions are discussed as cloud education is very necessary for the information society institution. Technology will get integrated into every aspect of the institutions and thus cloud education will change the classrooms, games fields, gyms and school trips. Whether offsite or onsite, the school, teachers, students and support staff will all be connected. In the cloud education system, all the classrooms will be paperless and the world will become the classroom. E-learning will change teaching and learning process in the educational situations. Students can learn from anywhere and teachers can teach from anywhere. The cloud can also encourage independent learning. Teachers could adopt a flipped classroom approach and students can take ownership of their own learning. Teachers can put resources for students through online to use. These could be videos, documents, audio podcasts or interactive images. All of these resources can be accessed through a student's computer, smart-phone or tablet with an internet connection by Wifi, 3G or 4G.
Cloud computing is beginning to play a key role in the transformation of education. The classrooms are integrated with World Wide Web, and education can be transformed easily and students across the globe can easily exchange their ideas. Now-a-days educational institutions have needs to respond quickly to increasing demands from students and faculty, while coping with fixed or declining budgets. In this challenging environment, cloud-based education has become an increasingly attractive option for delivering education services more securely, reliably, and economically.
The cloud computer offers the school complete information technology as a service solution and all the school desktops, applications, storage and services are moved to the cloud. The cloud computer is available over the internet from any user device including iPad, Android tablet, Mac, thin client machine or Windows personal computer. Faculty and learners can use an existing school device or use their own because the service is available over the internet and they can access it from home or on the travel.
The cloud education must simplify, speed and reduce the cost of development, integration procurement, and operation and maintenance of ICT infrastructure. Cloud and mobile are stimulating and transformative education process, which require a blended learning and technical approach. And it also strengthens, escalates and improves the learning performance. Cloud provides new strength to educators and it grants new role to student's ideas. It helps to get all the latest creative apps and services in Creative Cloud which are also used in education. The symbolic figure for cloud education is given in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Cloud Education
The cloud advanced is the progressions which are used in the technological field. In cloud education, the services are available from any location, at any time, on any device with a modern internet browser, extending the reach and accessibility of education services for all teachers and students. In education, it supplies high performance, secure access to the full range of school services including applications, storage and learning content. It provides Intuitive teacher control panel, featuring advanced classroom management, including the ability to unblock web sites on the fly, monitor and share screens, share tasks, conduct polls, post quick questions and have live chat with learners. Also it allows the teachers to change software as the curriculum changes without incurring unnecessary expenses (Educause, 2010).
Lahiri and Moseley (2013) conducted a study on “Migrating Educational Data and Services to Cloud Computing: Exploring Benefits and Challenges”.
“Cloud computing" is currently the "buzzword" in the Information Technology field. Cloud computing facilitates convenient access to information and software resources as well as easy storage and sharing of files and data, without the end users being aware of the details of the computing technology behind the process. This article explores cloud technology as an emerging new computing trend for delivering educational services; it evaluates the benefits of using cloud computing in education; discusses concerns about the cloud; and attempts to discover whether cloud computing truly enables efficient management of resources, thereby improving efficiency of educational institutions. The article ends with a checklist of important considerations for educational organizations contemplating migrating their data and services to cloud providers.
Karamete, A. (2015) conducted a study on “Computer Education and Instructional Technology Teacher Trainees' Opinion about Cloud Computing Technology”.
This study aims to show the present conditions about the usage of cloud computing in the department of Computer Education and Instructional Technology (CEIT) amongst teacher trainees in School of Necatibey Education, Balikesir University, Turkey. In this study, a questionnaire with open-ended questions was used. 17 CEIT teacher trainees participated in the study. The aim of this qualitative study was to determine trends about cloud technology. The cloud technology under study included "Dropbox", "SpiderOak", "Google Drive", "IDrive", "pCloud", "OpenDrive", "Bitcasa", "OneDrive", "Tresorit", "Box" and "Yandex.Disk. The CEIT teacher trainees' opinions about cloud storage and its purposes; their opinions about types of cloud storage and the level of importance of cloud storage were investigated. The reliability and validity were taken. The advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing were examined. The study found that CEIT teacher trainees' had used cloud storages such as Dropbox and Google Drive previously and they continue to use primarily Dropbox, followed by Google Drive and OneDrive respectively.
Wang, M., Chen, Y., Khan, M. J. (2014) conducted a study on “Mobile Cloud Learning for Higher Education: A Case Study of Moodle in the Cloud”.
Mobile cloud learning, a combination of mobile learning and cloud computing, is a relatively new concept that holds considerable promise for future development and delivery in the education sectors. Cloud computing helps mobile learning overcome obstacles related to mobile computing. The main focus of this paper is to explore how cloud computing changes traditional mobile learning. A case study of the usage of Moodle in the cloud via mobile learning in Khalifa University was conducted.
Schneckenberg, D. (2014) conducted a study on “Easy, Collaborative and Engaging--The Use of Cloud Computing in the Design of Management Classrooms” Cloud computing has recently received interest in information systems research and practice as a new way to organize information with the help of an increasingly ubiquitous computer infrastructure. However, the use of cloud computing in higher education institutions and business schools, as well as its potential to create novel learning environments remains an under researched topic. To address the research gap, this paper investigates how the capabilities of cloud computing have fostered collaborative learning processes of students in the design of management classrooms. The research project has taken place in a three-year period and has covered five post-graduate knowledge management classes, which have been situated in the context of business education. The paper presents an illustrative case study of five knowledge management classes as research design to explore and describe interconnections between methods of social constructionism and cloud computing properties which enhance collaborative learning experiences of students in the classroom. To develop a theoretical background for the case study, literature on constructivist and experiential learning, new management profiles, and information systems were reviewed. In the empirical part of the case study, the experimental blending of constructivist learning methods and the cloud computing platform Google Apps for Education in three post-graduate classes and two Executive Master of Business Administration classes on the topic of knowledge management were observed. For the data collection, focus was on collaboration processes to understand how students have used various cloud computing tools to work together, and how their usage has affected interaction and reflection in the observed courses. Findings show that collaborative properties of cloud computing, when they are undergirded by methods of social constructionism, influence learning factors on cognitive, emotional, spatial and group levels and lead to substantial changes in teacher/student roles and behaviours. The ease-of-use, playfulness and immediacy of cloud platforms creates collaborative learning spaces and has the potential to foster lateral thinking and problem solving of students in the classroom. By illuminating mutual interrelations between learning factors, constructivist principles and cloud computing properties, the paper enriches the literature on the innovative use of information system technologies in universities and business schools. The paper provides, in addition, practice-oriented insights for pedagogical and methodological choices that undergird the capabilities of cloud platforms to foster collaborative learning processes of students in higher education institutions.
The education cloud services are necessary for each and every education community. The services catalog which may include a phased operation plan, if some services need to be added over time, should be provided to vendors so that they know which services they need to deliver. The online education environment supports faceto- face interaction over the Education system, including online classes, lectures and discussions. Thus education service means the cloud applications, which are used for the user in education. Some of the examples for education service are ePortfolio, personal development, creation, Microsoft office, and so on. Education specific user services can also include:
Some of the cloud computing services used in schools are given below (ABS,2015)
Students in a particular class room are able to connect with other students in another class room from a different locality and communicate well without problems and create so called cloud classroom. Students with the help of webcams can share different ideas online. In most advanced and developed schools with cloud-based technologies in the classroom, one can find touchsensitive smart boards, with stylus style pens that are specialized to write and draw on smart touch sensitive boards. These smart boards actually have replaced the traditional white boards that used marker pens and frequent rubbings and writings. Teachers are able to customize their teachings on a mobile device such as iphone and display them on these touch-sensitive boards.
Cloud computing is becoming an adoptable technology for numerous associations with its vibrant scalability and usage of virtualized resources as a service through the Internet. Cloud education is an admirable choice for educational institutions which are especially for learners and it needs a computer with network devices. Universities take benefit of obtainable cloud-based applications offered by service providers and enable their own users/students to perform educational tasks. Many technologies that were formerly costly or unavailable are now becoming free to anyone with a web browser. This is factual for the entire web sites, blogs, music sharing, collaboration software, video sharing, social sharing, publishing, editing/presentation and computing platforms in the cloud. Learners previously using various technologies in their personal lives. Our education structure should take advantage of the same trend, which will both enrich our student's technology enabled education, and reduce the cost impact in academic institutions. University management should identify and influence emerging technologies that are cost-effective, and strive for the broadest feasible and equitable access to technology for students and faculty. Thus the cloud education in educational institutions becomes costeffective and easily available in web browser, with broadband in the schools, wireless in educational institutions and so on(Ercana, 2010). Figure representing the cloud education in educational institution in any place, any time and any device is given in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Cloud Education in Educational Institutions
Higher education institutions can now find point solutions for student recruiting, talent management, research, administration, and fundraising in the cloud. Cloudbased enterprise-level solutions are also available, with several vendors offering financial management solutions. Higher education institutions are seeking a better and more cost-effective way to implement IT services, without the burden of cost of maintenance and upgrades. Higher education finance models are complex and precarious, comprised of various combinations of tuition, philanthropy, investments, public funding, and research dollars. Above all, higher education serves students, and those students come to campus with their own devices and expectations about how and when they want to use them. Cloud computing is now as much about meeting student needs as it is about running an efficient campus (Bomfim, 2015).
With the help of cloud education, educators are able to generate interactive teaching. Students can visit the personalized website which is normally free and get their lessons thus they can also interact with their teachers from the comfort of their homes without visiting their class rooms.
The assigned group projects can be completed with the help of cloud education, and they are able to complete the projects by interacting with their group members through internet and submit the results from their houses through online. Generally, using cloud-based technologies, teacher and students are able to access software and data from a multitude of devices. They can then as well use these generally free technologies to ease the partnership together with engagement in face-toface, online, and blended courses (Fort, 2015).
a) Microsoft Live@edu for education: Microsoft Live@edu is intended for educational needs. It provides a set of hosted collaboration services for the education institutions. The hosted service includes collaboration services, communication tools, mobile, desktop, and web-based applications. It has the feature of data storage capabilities. Office Live Workspace, Windows Live Sky-Drive, Windows Live Spaces, Microsoft Shared View Beta, Microsoft Outlook Live, Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Alerts are the part of Live@edu suite.
b) Google Apps for Education: Google Apps is a collection of web-based programs and file storage that run in a web browser, without requiring users to buy or install software. Users can simply log in to the service to access their files and the tools to manipulate them. The communication tools of Google Apps are Gmail, Google Talk, and Google Calendar and the productivity tools are Google Docs: text files, spreadsheets, and presentations, iGoogle and Google Sites can develop web pages.
c) Amazon Web Services for Education: Amazon Web Services provides the cloud services in categories of Computing, Software, Content Delivery, Database, Storage, Deployment & Management, Application Services and Workforce (Lakshminarayanan, Kumar & Raju, 2013).
The following benefits are some major potential benefits to students by applying cloud services.
Some of the characteristics which are listed below are the compensation of teachers in cloud education (Staines, 2013).
Some of the drawbacks listed by Boyle, 2013 are given below:
Educational institutions provide wide technology services, which include internet, smart classes, online education, virtual learning, etc. In many Universities the internet is open to the entire student community and educators through Wifi. With the help of Wifi, the learner can transfer the information and learning materials from one person to another. Similarly the educators also give assignments and materials through email. Thus the cloud education takes a vital role in educational institutions.
One can play a key role in the education transformation in the country by implementing a sustainable, affordable education cloud. The cloud education must be provided to all the educational institutions and the security and legal requirements which are needed for cloud education need to be identified. Also the users must identify the type of data and type of processing that will be done in cloud education.
Cloud education can help communities and nations to transform education. An entire world of knowledge can now be made available to teachers and students through cloud-based services that can be accessed anytime, anywhere and from any device. The functionality available through cloud education services is sufficient for the needs of most users, who have access to their files and related software, at any place with a computer and an Internet connection. With the help of cloud education, the cost of preparation and delivering the learning material is minimized. Cloud education enables students across the globe to acquire contemporary skills and training, they need to compete and succeed in the global information society. Finally the author concludes that cloud education must be introduced in all the educational educational institutions for the new generation learners.