Cloud computing technology: The choice to enhance the learning environment for automotive vocational teacher education students as autonomous learners

Abstract

Automotive vocational teacher education is an education that has a purpose to prepare their students to be a teacher or an instructor in automotive vocational education. Therefore, they need to become autonomous learners to stay updated related to the development of automotive technology whenever they need it. This is very indispensable to set the learning environment to support their study activities to become autonomous learning. This study aims to determine the way the learning environment could be built to support their independent learning activities based on the students' perspectives. This study is descriptive research that contains quantitative and qualitative data. The data was collected from final-year Automotive Engineering Education department students at Yogyakarta State University by giving an open questionnaire. The results of the study are (1) 40.54% of respondents choose the development of cloud computing technology, 13.51% and 35.14% of respondents choose the development of physical things and non-physical things respectively as the way to build a supportive learning environment, then the rest 10.81% of respondents said that the existed learning environment has already been good, (2) online collaboration learning, online connection with industrial practitioners, blended learning, online resource center, and online educational media are the examples at most of several ways and competencies that are needed to build a supportive learning environment from the development of cloud computing technology, (3) practical lesson infrastructure and teacher's administration for teaching are needed from the development of physical things, (4) comfortable, pleasant, relax, and not serious situation, discipline, friendly lecturers, and an atmosphere as if being a vocational teacher are needed to be built so as to have supportive learning environment.