Abstract:

The wide diffusion of mobile devices and smartphones, supported by the more recent network technologies, has dramatically changed communication mechanisms and interactions among people. In addition, recent market analysis forecast a future with a plenty of connected devices rather than PCs. In fact, owing to the advancements in network infrastructure and services, cloud computing allows using cheap yet powerful devices and no mass storage is needed. This reflects on new challenges for education too: sharing common resources in a cloud environment allows Institutes and Universities developing and using common learning assets through reliable and customizable services continuously available to the users. In this respect, Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) can be considered the enabling technological framework for a new wave of functionalities in e-learning. Specifically, MCC applies to the mobile-learning methodology, driving to a new era, where both teachers and learners will use mobile computing applications on mobile devices, fostering the paradigm anywhere, anytime, any device.

Former m-learning projects often showed more drawbacks than advantages, considering in particular the additional efforts requested to instructional designers and teachers to develop activities which could be performed on poor devices, with small screen, limited bandwidth, in odd moments, e.g., while travelling, thus in uncomfortable environment. On the contrary, nowadays, full featured and powerful devices are available and MCC can overcome the problems of storage, bandwidth and activity synchronization as well as the problem of multiple device access to common resources and services.

The combination of using mobile devices and a cloud computing infrastructure provides several advantages, which make this solution a candidate to manage education and training services, especially valuable in developing countries and rural areas. The most evident advantage is cost effectiveness for the implementation and maintenance of hardware and software. It is significant that the popular open-source platform for e-learning, Moodle, is also available in a cloud oriented version. Moreover, MCC is a flexible solution that guarantees dynamic scalability as demand changes. Hence, MCC enables sustainable learning and offers features such as stability, effectiveness and data safety, also fostering the behavior of accessing and performing learning activities anytime anywhere. In addition, mobile devices offer features such as geo-localization, geo-tagging and location-based services, which can enrich the capabilities of activities designed for desktop. In fact, in the cloud a large amount of personal data can be stored, including information on individuals’ positions, and learning tasks can depend on them and provide users (learners) with resources based on spatial information, improving education results and both the user experience and satisfaction.

Despite the listed advantages, there are still critical and open issues to be managed in the field of learning in cloud and social computing, such as: mobile data management, machine-to-machine communication, security and privacy, scalability. The paper will go through the benefits of the approach and will review existing experiences, also considering the main problems that it has to face in order to be really successful.

Keywords:

Mobile learning, mobile cloud computing.