The cloud hovering over the virtual campus

The Virtual Campus has been around for about 20 years. It provides an online environment that mimics the processes and services of the physical campuses and classrooms. Its adoption is almost complete in countries where Internet access has become ubiquitous. For a time seemed like the innovation in education was happening in the Virtual Campus, but this is no more. Personal Learning Environments, Life Long Learning, MOOCS, Open Educational Resources, Mobile Apps, Gamification, Social Networks, free Cloud based services... al of the above and even more hint that not all the learning today is happening at school or in the Virtual Campus.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft

Using Virtual Worlds and Sloodle to Develop Educative Applications

Proceedings of: International Workshop on evidenced-based Technology Enhanced Learning (ebTEL'12). Salamanca (Spain), 28-30 March 2012Education is one of the most interesting applications of virtual worlds, as they can create opportunities to offer educative contents with the advantages of online courses, with the feel of "presence" that this immersive environments can provide. While most of social networking resources are mainly focused on sharing contents using a traditional web interface, virtual worlds facilitate the creation of social networks that enhance the perception and communication among its users through the use of additional modalities. In this paper we analyze the main resources provided by the Second Life virtual world and Sloodle to develop educational environments and describe their application in a educative project at the Universidad Carlos III de MadridResearch funded by projects CICYT TIN2011-28620-C02-01, CICYT TEC 2011-28626-C02-02, CAM CONTEXTS (S2009/TIC-1485), and DPS2008-07029-C02-02.Publicad

Design and Assessment of an Experimental SDN-Enabled Private Cloud using Openstack

Nowadays, educational and research institutions, especially universities, have considered their focus on cloud computing rather than using conventional prospects to take the most benefits of the services offered to support current trends in teaching and learning strategies. To build these networks in a cost effective way, open source cloud computing platforms are used. One of the powerful tools is Openstack, which allows users to create virtual networks and manage virtual machines within distributed learning environments. In this article, we describe our project on designing and evaluating a private cloud within a university environment using Openstack. To this end, we conduct a survey to measure the students’ attitude towards the use of private clouds in which students and experts serve as samples. We design a virtual lab consisting of a number of virtual machines operated by a selected sample. We evaluate the proposed solution by adopting Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) methodology. The results obtained from this study show that the students’ acceptance in using the private cloud in performing their tasks is encouraging albeit their anxiety on security issues and their lack of experience

Strategies and challenges to facilitate situated learning in virtual worlds post-Second Life

Virtual worlds can establish a stimulating environment to support a situated learning approach in which students simulate a task within a safe environment. While in previous years Second Life played a major role in providing such a virtual environment, there are now more and more alternative—often OpenSim-based—solutions deployed within the educational community. By drawing parallels to social networks, we discuss two aspects: how to link individually hosted virtual worlds together in order to implement context for immersion and how to identify and avoid “fake” avatars so people behind these avatars can be held accountable for their actions