Cloud computing is a significant alternative in today's educational perspective. The technology gives the students and teachers the opportunity to quickly access various application platforms and resources through the web pages on-demand. Unfortunately, not all educational institutions often have an ability to take full advantages of the newest information technology. The paper analyzes possibilities of the cloud computing technology that can help educational institutions to support the process of teaching and learning.
There is also presented a cloud computing technology based solution introducing the MS Live@Edu environment as a means of communication and collaboration between lecturers and students. The authors have a successful experience of using MS Live@Edu during 3 academic years for delivering about 10 unique courses for approximately 700 students in Kaunas University of Technology (KTU). The use of MS Live@Edu environment for educational purposes is summarized by explaining the advantages of cloud computing gained both by lecturers and students.
In recent years a small number of web-based tools have been proposed to help students learn to write SQL query statements and also to assess students' SQL writing skills. SQLify is a new SQL teaching and assessment tool that extends the current state-of-the-art by incorporating peer review and enhanced automatic assessment based on database theory to produce more comprehensive feedback to students. SQLify (pronounced as squalify) is intended to yield a richer learning experience for students and reduce marking load for instructors. In this paper SQLify is compared with existing tools and important new features are demonstrated.
According to many recent studies the effect of learning style on academic performance has been found to be significant and mismatch between teaching and learning styles causes learning failure and frustration. Thus balancing the teaching style and the students' learning style is very important. When emphasizing the individual learning processes, web-based learning offers a good opportunity for differentiating ways of learning. So far the aim of this study is to describe different learners (categorized by cognitive learning styles) and their learning processes in relation to their learning outcomes and perceptions of learning experience on a web-based course. The results of the study showed that there were different kinds of learners, who utilized and experienced the learning material differently. The students varied both in their cognitive learning styles and in their learning processes, but not in the learning results, measured by grades. As an implication, some recommendations were presented for developing the web-based learning environment.