Cloud Education Environment

Abstract

Cloud-based services are constantly evolving. Many of the so-called cloud services, traditionally known as Web 2.0 services because of their innovative features, have added an important element to the cloud landscape, which is interoperability features, opening their APIs to allow consumers to use their services in creative and innovative ways. This opens the possibility to create orchestrated services that provide learning experiences, which were not possible before. This also changes the paradigm from a monolithic architectural approach of education environments to a flexible, distributed and heterogeneous architectural setting for education environments, which is the aim of cloud education (learning and teaching) environments. This also maximizes innovation possibilities, allowing interoperability of the best and most appropriate cloud services based on learning needs, freeing up from a vendor specific approaches and limits, transforming the cloud education environment into a digital educational ecosystem of services and resources available for the practitioners, in contrast to a large amount of software services that are difficult to manage and organize for a learning setting. In this special issue, we present contributions related to this field, especially relevant descriptions about the type cloud of services and how to address re-use of components. Three different and complementary architectures are described, first an initial approach for cloud interoperability service, which addresses general interoperability of cloud-based services within a learning environment.