An Interactive and Personalized Cloud-Based Virtual Learning System to Teach Computer Science

摘要

Virtual learning environments (VLE) provide up-to-date education and training for individuals, and in some cases they can generate personalized feedback based on the learner's performance. Unlike other VLE's available to-date, the learning system developed in this work extends the basic instructional and assessment capabilities of a typical VLE by dynamically creating a cloud-based computer laboratory that is needed by Computer Science students. Specifically, the basic capabilities of Moodle are enhanced by developing two new modules: a virtual lab module (VLM) and a study progress module (SPM). VLM utilizes Amazon's EC2 cloud-based web services technology in order to create a personalized experimental environment especially suited for Computer Science students although the same concept can easily be applied to other disciplines. SPM, on the other hand, evaluates student progress in terms of specific learning objectives and offers personalized guidance using the Apriori data mining technique. An implemented cloud-based Internet Application Development laboratory highlights the advantages of the proposed approach.