The use of Cloud Computing and mobile technologies to facilitate access to an e-learning solution in higher education context work in progress

摘要

cloud computing offers great opportunities for higher education institutions to take advantage of e-learning solutions without having to invest in hardware, software or infrastructure. Kabul Polytechnic (KPU) is a major public university in the capital city of Afghanistan providing higher education in various engineering disciplines. Student at KPU go to winter vacation after the fall semester which usually lasts for 3 months depending on weather conditions. Due to this long vacation and lack of interaction and communication with faculty members, most of the students forget a major portion of what they had learned in the preceding semester. This leads to critical challenges in the upcoming make-up examinations for the students who had failed any subject(s). To overcome these challenges, we propose a solution based on cloud computing and mobile technologies to facilitate access to courses and learning materials anytime, anywhere. The solution consists of two parts: (i) Google Course Builder (An Open Source e-Learning Platform) which we customized and deployed on Google App Engine (GAE) and (ii) an Android Application which we developed to facilitate quick and easy access to learning contents on mobile devices. To measure success, we divided the failed students of computer networking course at KPU into two groups where only one group of students were registered to interact with the system during the winter vacation. As a result, there was an increase of 12% in the average score and 25% in the passing rate of the registered group. In addition, the system functionalities and ease of use were positively evaluated by participants and some new features were also proposed. On the other hand, latency in service delivery and low performance, especially in the peak times were reported due to the low speed Internet and limitation in GAE free trial plan.