Cloud-Enabled Learning Environment

Abstract

The emergence of cloud computing has changed the ways of thinking, communicating, performing professions, and maintaining sociocultural and community relations. The capacious cloud storage and its amazingly growing facilities and capabilities in virtualizing human activities and the entire phenomenal entities and in synchronizing them with new digital cloud technologies such as laptops, tablets, smartphones or mobile phones, and personal computers (PCs) have not only increased human capabilities, but also added new creative dimensions to sociocultural, economic, political, epistemological, ontological, and educational fields. The ways of producing, sharing, and acquiring knowledge, teaching, and learning have been profoundly changed. So this chapter first defines what a cloud-enabled learning environment refers to and critically examines how cloud computing optimizes learning opportunities and transforms teaching and learning pedagogies. Then, it critically explores how cloud-enabled learning environments and cloud-based pedagogies can address the gaps in education caused by the digital divide, how cloud-assisted networks of local learning-hubs can contribute to the success of global literacy campaigns, and how cloud computing reaffirms the significance of distance learning or massive open online course (MOOC) and cloud-assisted practices of teaching self. The rapid shifts in pedagogical grounds from non-virtual paradigms into the virtual world or the cloud clearly indicate that in the future teaching and learning activities and pedagogies become more cloudocratic.