Advancing collaborative learning with cloud service

Abstract

Cloud computing has become one of the most important information technologies due to the development of Internet technologies. Accordingly, cloud computing has been applied to various fields, in which many researchers have also tried to apply cloud computing to education field. Despite much research on cloud to education, little effort has been devoted to applying them to a course in programming. Programming is a subtle and serious work, which requires a lot time to think, design, implement, testing and debugging. Hence, teachers often teach students to collaboratively engage in programming. Among the applications of cloud computing, collaborative service is the most potential applications for achieving collaborative learning, in which they can be used to assist students in collaboratively accomplishing a learning task. Accordingly, we explore how to use such services to assist students in learning programming. Three collaborative services are used in this study, in which Simplenote is used to support students in discussing; Google Docs is used to support students in designing; CodeRun is used to support students in programming. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.