Collaboration in the cloud and online education environments

Cloud computing is attractive [1-3] from several points of view for next generation online education. There are many jobs [4, 5]. It supports shared information repositories as well as sharing the real time and asynchronous interaction between teachers and learners. The promise of virtual universities in the cloud has been highlighted by the growing interest in MOOC's (massive open online courses) which are naturally hosted on clouds. The basic delivery model of MOOC's is reasonably traditional with the scaling of clouds added. However MOOC's emphasize new collaboration models for the interaction between mentors (graders, teachers) and students. Further “laboratories” are typically used in many classes and we discuss the use of clouds to support computing labs attached to computer science and related classes. We suggest that MOOC technology can be used in different ways. Rather than single classes aimed at many students, we suggest that an alternative is multiple classes customized for different communities. Here we have a MOOC lesson repository (in the cloud) and technology like Google Course Builder to construct different “play lists” corresponding to the different classes. This has been implicitly used in past with “PowerPoint” presentations placed on the web and then re-used in different ways However often PowerPoint is hard to re-use and it seems more promising to re-use the MOOC lesson with presentation and recorded lecture.