OPEN LEARNING SKY: A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR A CLOUD BASED OPEN eLEARNING ENVIRONMENT Heba Fasihuddin, Geoff Skinner and Rukshan Athauda The University of Newcastle Faculty of Science and Information Technology Callaghan, NSW, Australia Heba.Fasihuddin@uon.edu.au, Geoff.Skinner@newcastle.edu.au, Rukshan.Athauda@newcastle.edu.au ABSTRACT The technology revolution has its strong impacts on different fields and industries. E-learning is one of those fields that is dramatically affected and changed over the previous years. Cloud computing and Web 2.0 features (i.e. blogs, Wikis, etc.) provide great opportunities to move e-learning to a new era. Different initiatives are established based on employing the cloud and Web 2.0 capabilities. This paper highlights the limitations of the contemporary initiatives. The paper introduces a framework for an open learning environment called Open Learning Sky. The aim of the proposed learning environment is to provide learning in more open, flexible, adaptive and interactive format. KEY WORDS Cloud computing, open e-learning, e-learning architecture, education. 1. Introduction E-learning is one of the most actively researched fields in information technology. Due to the continuous technology revolution, it is changing and evolving dramatically. It is changed from being fixed, isolated process to be more flexible, interactive and convenient process. The revolution of mobile services and communication technology contribute to emerge a new form of e-learning, which is m-learning. M-learning refers to learning through mobile devices. It is considered a part of e- learning [1]. Over the recent years, various technologies have been applied in order to improve and support e- learning and m-learning. Some of those technologies are Service-oriented Grid [2-5], intelligent agents [6, 7] and Deep-web technology [8]. Recently, most of the research focus on applying cloud computing to e-learning, as it is considered a great opportunity for educational institutions to achieve different benefits. The recent emerging of cloud computing and the capabilities of Web 2.0 technology lead to move e- learning to more open and flexible format. Recently, different initiatives that aim to provide learning materials in freely open format are established or announced [9-16]. Every initiative has its own features that make it distinct and its own limitation as well. Reviewing all the contemporary initiatives and studying the capabilities of cloud computing and the opportunities that it can offer to e-learning domain, led the authors to propose an open learning environment, which is called Open Learning Sky. The aim of Open Learning Sky is to provide learning to the world in an open, flexible, adaptive and interactive approach. The aim of this paper is to introduce a preliminary design of the proposed Open Learning Sky. This design is based on cloud computing technology and involves different tools and techniques that support adaptive and interactive features. This paper is organised as follow. Firstly, section 2 provides a background of some related concepts which includes cloud computing and its relation to e-learning as well as an overview of the concept of open learning. Next, section 3 presents some of the defined limitations of the current open learning initiatives. Then, the proposed design of Open Learning Sky is presented in section 4. Finally, the paper is concluded in section 5. 2. Background 2.1 Cloud Computing Cloud computing is a new era of computing technology. It is classified in [17] as the fifth generation of computing after mainframe, personal computer, client-server computing and the Web. Cloud computing moves the computing infrastructure and data away from the users to the cloud, and provides them on-demand as a service over the Internet. Five essential characteristics are defend by The National Institute of Standard and Technology (NIST) for cloud computing. These characteristics are on- demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity and measured service. In addition, NIST defines Cloud Computing as follows: “Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on- demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction”[18] . Cloud computing has four different deployment models [18-21]. The first type of these deployment models is the Private cloud, which refers to the situation when the cloud is owned solely by a specific organization and not available to the public. It can be managed by the Proceedings of the IASTED International Conference - , 2012 , Engineering and Applied Science (EAS 2012) December 27 29 Colombo Sri Lanka DOI: 10.2316/P.2012.785-043 254