Integration of Cloud Computing and Web2.0 Collaboration Technologies in E-Learning

摘要

Cloud computing technology is an emerging new computing paradigm for delivering computing services. Although it still in its early stage, it has changed the way how many applications are developed and accessed. This computing approach relies on a number of existing technologies, such as Web2.0, virtualization, Service oriented architecture (SOA), Web services, etc. Cloud computing is growing rapidly and becoming an adoptable technology for the organizations especially education institutes, with its dynamic scalability and usage of virtualized resources as a service through the Internet. Today, eLearning is also becoming a very popular and powerful trend. However, in traditional webbased elearning systems, building and maintenance are located onsite in institutions or enterprises, which causes lot of problems to appear, such as lacking the support of underlying infrastructures, which can dynamically allocate the needed calculation and storage resources for e learning systems. As the need for e learning is increasing continuously and its necessary for e learning systems to keep pace with the right technology needed for development and improvement. However, today's technologies (such as Web 2.0, Cloud, etc.) enable to build more successful and effective educational environment, that provide collaboration and interaction in eLearning environments. The challenge is to use and integrate these technologies in order to construct tools that allow the best possible learning results. Cloud computing and Web2.0 are two areas that are starting to strongly effect how the development, deployment and usage of e Learning application. This paper presents the benefits of using cloud computing with the integration of Web 2.0 collaboration technologies in eLearning environment.