Special Issue: Cloud Education Environments

Alexander Mikroyannidis is a guest editor of the Special Issue on Cloud Education Environments published by the Journal of Universal Computer Science (JUCS). Together with Rocael Hernandez Rizzardini, Hans-Christian Schmitz, Carlos Delgado Kloos and Lee Chao, they have compiled a selection of publications, showcasing theoretical frameworks and practical applications in the emerging topic of education on the cloud.

Cloud Learning Environments consider the cloud as a large autonomous system not owned by any educational organisation. In this system, the users of cloud-based services are academics or learners, who share the same privileges, including control, choice, and sharing of content on these services. This approach has the potential to enable and facilitate both formal and informal learning for the learner. It also promotes the openness, sharing and reusability of learning resources on the web.

The publications of this special issue present several rich use cases for different contexts of the use of cloud-based services for educational scenarios, varying from a range of students, countries (including, Europe, Guatemala and some other Latin American countries), pedagogical approaches, types of tools and environments (e.g. cloud education environments, personal learning environments, traditional LMS), as well as evaluation perspectives (e.g. usability, emotions, acceptance).