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Journal of Computing and Information Technology - CIT 23, 2015, 1, 75–86 doi:10.2498 /cit.1002517 75 Using Cloud Services in a Modern Learning Management System Alexei Scerbakov, Martin Ebner and Nikolai Scerbakov Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria LMS (Learning Management Systems) today are being widely used in almost every educational facility. In the last years all conceivable use cases that need to be carried out by such LMS have been defined and the features a modern LMS needs to offer are very clear. Rarely do we find something a teacher or student needs that an LMS cannot offer. So the task for LMS developers shifted from offering all tools a teacher or student needs to make these tools as convenient to use as possible. Our goal in this research work is to describe the web services we use in TeachCenter, an LMS that has been widely used for the past years at Graz University of Technology to simplify the use of certain components. It can be pointed out that cloud services have to be an integral part of a modern LMS. Keywords: learning management systems, LMS, cloud services, teach center, web services 1. Introduction Technologies, in detail web technologies, are shaping the way we teach and learn today. Dur- ing the last years a dramatic shift happened from teaching without Internet technologies to teach- ing with a ubiquitous available Internet. The speed of how technology is changing is amaz- ing and educators as well as learners get over- whelmed. At the turn of the millennium, so called Learning Management Systems (LMS) were introduced aiming to assist lecturers in their main activities (Maurer, 1996). With an enormous speed lecture over lecture went dig- ital and today each university in Middle Eu- rope owns their own system holding mainly lec- ture content (presentation, handouts), admin- istrative notes for a lecture, and further tools (e-assessment, uploading tools, calendar, ... ) online. After that, the Web 2.0 movement (OReilly, 2006), described as the area where users get more active in the World Wide Web through participation in Wikis, Weblogs or even So- cial Media, hit the field of education under the name of eLearning 2.0 (Downes, 2005). Since then, the number of possibilities of how the web enhances teaching and learning has nearly exploded (Ebner, 2007). Wikis (Au- gar et al., 2004)(Raitman, 2005), Weblogs (Farmer & Bartlett-Bragg, 2005), Podcasting (Evans, 2007)(Towned, 2005) as well as the use of Social Media (Ebner, 2013) for educa- tion attracted many lecturers and learners and changed the way how we use web technolo- gies in our daily life. Since then, collabora- tion, cooperation, and communication between students-teachers as well students-students can be done in an entirely new way (Schaffert & Ebner, 2012), including the use of semantic technologies (Klamma et al., 2007). For ex- ample, applications such as etherpad or Google Drive allow for a timely interaction with each other or mobile technologies allow for a partic- ipation from nearly anywhere (Alley, 2014). Consequently, online communication and col- laboration can only happen if the data is also available online for each participant. Therefore, the number of so called cloud-based services and appropriate devices, and the idea to grant users access to hosted centralized data centers with thin clients are growing (Fang et al., 2009). Cloud sharing services such as Dropbox (Drago et al., 2012) follow a centralized approach – each single user stores their data in a shared folder on the web, where a group of users have access as well as the rights to edit and change. The fact that after each edit all changes are au-

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Page 1: Using Cloud Services in a Modern Learning Management System · Using Cloud Services in a Modern Learning Management System Alexei Scerbakov, Martin Ebner and Nikolai Scerbakov Graz

Journal of Computing and Information Technology - CIT 23, 2015, 1, 75–86doi:10.2498/cit.1002517

75

Using Cloud Services in a ModernLearning Management System

Alexei Scerbakov, Martin Ebner and Nikolai ScerbakovGraz University of Technology, Graz, Austria

LMS (Learning Management Systems) today are beingwidely used in almost every educational facility. In thelast years all conceivable use cases that need to be carriedout by such LMS have been defined and the features amodern LMS needs to offer are very clear. Rarely do wefind something a teacher or student needs that an LMScannot offer. So the task for LMS developers shiftedfrom offering all tools a teacher or student needs to makethese tools as convenient to use as possible. Our goalin this research work is to describe the web services weuse in TeachCenter, an LMS that has been widely usedfor the past years at Graz University of Technology tosimplify the use of certain components. It can be pointedout that cloud services have to be an integral part of amodern LMS.

Keywords: learning management systems, LMS, cloudservices, teach center, web services

1. Introduction

Technologies, in detail web technologies, areshaping the way we teach and learn today. Dur-ing the last years a dramatic shift happened fromteaching without Internet technologies to teach-ing with a ubiquitous available Internet. Thespeed of how technology is changing is amaz-ing and educators as well as learners get over-whelmed. At the turn of the millennium, socalled Learning Management Systems (LMS)were introduced aiming to assist lecturers intheir main activities (Maurer, 1996). With anenormous speed lecture over lecture went dig-ital and today each university in Middle Eu-rope owns their own system holding mainly lec-ture content (presentation, handouts), admin-istrative notes for a lecture, and further tools(e-assessment, uploading tools, calendar, . . . )online.

After that, the Web 2.0 movement (OReilly,2006), described as the area where users getmore active in the World Wide Web throughparticipation in Wikis, Weblogs or even So-cial Media, hit the field of education underthe name of eLearning 2.0 (Downes, 2005).Since then, the number of possibilities of howthe web enhances teaching and learning hasnearly exploded (Ebner, 2007). Wikis (Au-gar et al., 2004) (Raitman, 2005), Weblogs(Farmer & Bartlett-Bragg, 2005), Podcasting(Evans, 2007) (Towned, 2005) as well as theuse of Social Media (Ebner, 2013) for educa-tion attracted many lecturers and learners andchanged the way how we use web technolo-gies in our daily life. Since then, collabora-tion, cooperation, and communication betweenstudents-teachers as well students-students canbe done in an entirely new way (Schaffert &Ebner, 2012), including the use of semantictechnologies (Klamma et al., 2007). For ex-ample, applications such as etherpad or GoogleDrive allow for a timely interaction with eachother or mobile technologies allow for a partic-ipation from nearly anywhere (Alley, 2014).

Consequently, online communication and col-laboration can only happen if the data is alsoavailable online for each participant. Therefore,the number of so called cloud-based servicesand appropriate devices, and the idea to grantusers access to hosted centralized data centerswith thin clients are growing (Fang et al., 2009).Cloud sharing services such as Dropbox (Dragoet al., 2012) follow a centralized approach –each single user stores their data in a sharedfolder on the web, where a group of users haveaccess as well as the rights to edit and change.The fact that after each edit all changes are au-

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tomatically pushed to all group members helpsmaking such a service valuable and useable. To-day, more or less all big software companies of-fer such a service – iCloud, share point, GoogleDrive, and Dropbox (Wenjin et al., 2010) arejust the most recognized ones.

It is easily imaginable that lecturers, as wellas learners, are asking for integration of suchcloud-based services into the LMS (Stantchevet al., 2014). Therefore, we address the fol-lowing research question in this research study:How and to what extent should cloud-based ser-vices be integrated into existing Learning Man-agement Systems?

Our publication starts after a short introductionand then explains the research into the archi-tecture of a Learning Management System fol-lowed by a description of how cloud-based ser-vices can be integrated. Finally, we will discussthe advantages and disadvantages for users.

2. Research Design

In our research study we are strongly follow-ing the approach of information systems pro-totyping. According to (Alavi, 1984) as wellas (Larsen, 1986) prototyping is based on foursteps: identifying basic requirements, develop-ment of a working prototype, implementationand usage, and revision. Therefore, we identi-fied students’ requirements according to cloudsystems (Ebner et al., 2013) and developed aworking system (Nunamaker & Chen, 1990).The following chapters will describe these newcomponents in more detail. After the final im-plementation we observed students’ usage; andwe learned about the role of cloud systems inan LMS.

3. General Concept

Graz University of Technology has a long his-tory and profound experience in technology en-hanced learning. First experiments were car-ried out to enhance online education by devel-oping special authoring tools (Maurer & Scer-bakov, 1996) and information systems with aspecial focus on e-learning needs (Andrews etal., 1994) almost simultaneously with generalrecognition of WWW potential for university

education (Dietinger & Maurer, 1998). Suchexperiments provided an essential experienceand know-how for developing a large ContentManagement System called “Hyper-G” (Kappeet al., 1994) and a Learning Management Sys-tem “WBT-Master” (Helic et al., 2004). A log-ical follow up development and variant is theso called TeachCenter (TC), which serves asa heavily used Learning Management Systemat Graz University of Technology since 2007.After a pilot phase testing different use cases(Ebner et al., 2006) (Ebner & Walder, 2008)it became a university wide service and is usedtoday by more than 15,000 students and 2,000lecturers. Between 2008 and 2010 a numberof Web 2.0 applications were integrated usingso called Application Programming Interfaces,following the approach of Edupunk (Ebner etal., 2011). Today, it differs significantly fromother popular LMS in a number of aspects.

3.1. Architecture of TeachCenter

TeachCenter is built on the base of innovativearchitecture known as AJAX (AsynchronousJavaScript and XML). Thus, data processingis performed on the client side by means ofJavaScript and dynamic HTML. As a result, thesystem demonstrates good performance underheavy load. Thus, the system can be seen as anumber of HTML 5 files with the inclusion ofCSS and JavaScript files. JavaScript files com-municate to a server using the JSON (JavaScriptObject Notation) protocol. Server functionalityis essentially simplified and implemented as anumber of Java servlets. In this architectureJava servlets do not handle any data processing,but retrieve data from a database and wrap it inaccordance with JSON standards. It should beespecially noted that the TeachCenter normallyworks with three hundred to five hundred userssimultaneously and the response time for anyaction is very fast. This creates comfortableenvironment for end users.

Another well-known advantage of AJAX is theutilization of modern user interface elements.For example, most editing in TeachCenter isdone using advanced user interface featuressuch as drag and drop, event-based function-ality and so on. Some well-known disadvan-tages of AJAX, such as security problems incase of script manipulation, are not so critical

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for an e-learning system, because it does notcontain sensitive data and is partially mitigatedin TeachCenter by means of so called tokens.Users get a unique token as they log in to the sys-tem and this token is stored on both, the serverand the client sides. When the user performsan action, the tokens are checked for equality.Thus, some actions that are not supposed to bedone by the user are easily identifiable.

3.2. Main TeachCenter Concepts

Normally, LMS offer courses consisting ofHTML pages that need to be authored by theteacher beforehand. In other words, a coursecan be seen as a combination of HTML pagesand authoring is one of the main tasks to be per-formed by teachers as they work with an LMS.

A few years of experience in Graz University ofTechnologies have shown that the need for au-thoring is the main obstacle for the acceptanceof a system used by teachers.

In order to improve acceptance of the systemby teachers, the TeachCenter was built using amodular concept. Courses consist of a num-ber of predefined areas and additional tools.For example, there is a special area for doingannouncements for students, a special area for

describing administrative issues such as coursecalendar, objectives of a course and so on. Suchareas demand a minimum (if any) amount ofauthoring from the teacher side. Teachers caneasily add new announcements and delete ormodify existing ones. As an example of addi-tional tools, there are student projects, wherestudents upload any files teachers demand, andthe quiz tool, where teachers define questions tousers, that must be answered within the stipu-lated time. Needless to say, the areas and mod-ules can be easily switched on or off, to createa course as a collection of areas and tools thatsatisfies the teachers’ needs.

One of the most important tasks an LMS hasto fulfill is file management and distribution.That is, teachers must have extremely simpleand powerful tools to upload files to the serverand students must have equally convenient toolsto download files to their computers. In theTeachCenter there is a special area responsiblefor such file management. It is called courselibrary.

As you can see in Figure 1, the course library isa collection of folders and documents that wereuploaded and organized by a teacher. This task,uploading data and arranging files in the courselibrary, can be rather time consuming, depend-ing on the particular size and number of files.

Figure 1. TeachCenter course library.

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We should also mention that initial uploadingnormally does not create particular problems,but students should always get the latest versionof the files. And keeping all files in an up-to-date version, as well as notifying users of thelatest changes of files, may create reasonableproblems. A solution that would save the userssome time and make a better user experience isusing a cloud sharing service to deliver coursematerials from the TeachCenter to the learners’desktop and materials from a teacher’s desktopto the TeachCenter.

4. Delivering from TC

When we speak about downloading materialsfrom an LMS, we normally talk about three sce-narios

1. A teacher uploads materials to the LMS. Allmaterials are visualized with information ondate of uploading and size of the uploadedfile. Students may freely browse this repos-itory and use information about the date ofuploading and the size in order to identifymaterials for downloading. No additionalnotification on new materials is provided.

2. A teacher uploads materials to the LMS andthe LMS automatically sends emails to all

users that are subscribed to notification onupdates. Users download materials only af-ter receiving such emails.

3. A teacher uploads materials to the LMS. TheLMS generates an RSS (Really Simple Syn-dication) feed where all the latest modifica-tions are described. Students subscribe toone or more of such feeds and get notifica-tions from special RSS readers directly ontheir desktops.

All these three scenarios are implemented inTC. There is a forth innovative scenario basedon cloud services. So called OAuth authentica-tion and Dropbox API are heavily used in theTeachCenter. Loosely speaking, the OAuth au-thentication protocol enables a third party ap-plication to obtain limited access to an HTTPservice. In our case the users define the socalled OAuth signature where they request ac-cess to their Dropbox directory and a so calledtoken. This token is generated by the Dropboxserver to allow access to the services describedin the signature. Each user who has defined asignature and got a token from Dropbox, savesthis information in the user profile. Thus theTeachCenter now has access to selected users’Dropboxes. In this way, users may identifysome TC folders of interest and synchronize

Figure 2. Dropbox folder view with the corresponding files in TeachCenter.

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them via Cronjob with their own Dropbox fold-ers. From the user point of view, we achievefunctionality which can be seen as automaticdelivery of actual files onto the user’s Desktop.Technically, we use two synchronization proce-dures. The first one synchronizes a folder onthe TeachCenter with a folder on Dropbox andthe second one synchronizes Dropbox folderswith user desktops (Figure 2). The advantageof the latter approach can be seen as full automa-tion of delivering learning materials instead ofmanual downloading them after any kind of no-tification. The LMS automatically scans therepositories for new files and uploads them touser Dropboxes via the API.

5. Delivering to TC

Similar to downloading materials from theTeachCenter, teachers are responsible for up-loading new materials and updating the existingones. Normally, such uploading is done usingspecial forms or more advanced interface solu-tions, such as drag and drop.

Of course, an ideal solution would be automaticuploading of the latest version of files, imme-

diately after their modification on the teacher’sdesktop. TeachCenter provides such possibili-ties via cloud services similar to downloadingmaterials. A teacher defines signature and to-ken for accessing a particular Dropbox, but thisinformation is not attached to a personal, but toa course profile. Additionally, teachers identifyDropbox directories that must be synchronizedwith folders in the TeachCenter. Let us considera typical sequence of actions on how a file ap-pears on the TeachCenter. A teacher opens theDropbox folder on their computer and creates afile (it might be a .doc, .pdf, .ppt file etc.). Theteacher may edit this file using ordinary edit-ing tools such as Microsoft Office, Open Officeetc. As soon as the files on their local com-puter are modified, they are synchronized withthe files on the Dropbox server. TeachCenteron stipulated time scans directories on Dropboxand synchronizes them with the directories onTeachCenter. Virtually, this functionality maybe seen as automatic access to the latest versionof files that are situated on a teacher’s desk-top. To avoid unnecessary traffic with multiplecopies of one and the same file, actual synchro-nization is carried out as a Cronjob once a day.

Figure 3. TeachCenter uploading features view.

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Figure 4. Dropbox synchronization view window.

6. Sharing Materials

Very oftenLearningManagement Systems serveas repositories of files uploaded by studentsfor evaluation by teachers. Typical examplewould be if a teacher requests each student toperform some programming work and uploadsource files to the server for evaluation by theteacher.

To avoid any problems with mass uploadingfiles by the students, e.g. time of uploading,deadlocks, corrupted files and so on, Teach-Center uses the following approach. Studentsregister their Dropbox folders in TeachCenterin the same way as before. That is, they pro-vide signature and token to provide access toa certain folder in Dropbox. Students are sup-posed to put their materials (result documentsand files) into such Dropbox folders. From auser point of view, they simply drag and dropthem to a remote folder on their desktop. Afterthe deadline for the upload, the teacher initiatesa special procedure to download all files ontothe server. Since copies of the files are still keptin Dropbox folders, the problem of corrupteduploads is solved. If a teacher identifies a cor-rupted file on the server, they can easily repeatsynchronization with the folder containing theoriginal (uncorrupted) file. It also solves the

problem of network traffic, because download-ing is done only once and at night, when theserver load is minimal.

7. Collaborative Authoring

One of the most popular components of theTeachCenter is called group lockers. This com-ponent is intensively used for arranging differ-ent kinds of practical work. The componentcan be defined for any TeachCenter course andcan be seen as a collection of so called lockers.A locker is a protected memory area that canonly be used by a group of students who arecalled members of this group. Members of aparticular group can access the locker, previewits content and upload files. Any uploads aredone on behalf of a particular user group andcan be accessed and modified by members ofthis group.

Roughly, lockers simplify the following trainingscenario.

1. A teacher defines a practical assignment fora certain user group. This assignment can bedefined as a textual file for every group or asone single assignment for all groups.

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Figure 5. List of a number of student lockers.

2. The students solve this particular problemand generate a number of files. These canbe textual files, source code files, result ofsome calculations and so on.

3. The students upload these files to their lock-ers. The teacher has access to any locker

in their course and export facilities that al-low to export all locker content to a formprocessable on a local computer.

4. The teacher evaluates the assignments up-loaded by the students and writes commentsand provides evaluation points.

Figure 6. Single student locker view.

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The concept of lockers is that they are supposedto be used for collaborative work on a particularassignment. At the same time, lockers pro-vide purely single user functionality (upload-ing files and access files). In order to providereal multi-user facilities, the locker functional-ity was extended with an interface to cloud ser-vices such as Google Drive or Etherpad. Eachlocker may be associated with a particular ac-count on Google docs, Google Drive or Ether-pad. As soon as a user defines signature andtoken for accessing a user account on this cloudservice, this information is saved into the userlocker and the system gets access to files onthe cloud service. Additionally, all membersof the working group provide information ontheir own cloud service accounts and Teach-Center takes care of providing access to filesfrom TeachCenter from any cloud user account.Thus, users may edit files in a really collabo-rative way and the latest version of the files issaved in the user lockers.

8. Remote Evaluation of Submissions

As it was mentioned earlier, student lockers areone of the most popular applications in Teach-Center, that are actively used for many differentpurposes. One of the most often used scenariosof lockers are different kinds of programmingexercises. In this case teachers define a taskthat must be solved as a particular program-

ming application. Students are supposed to up-load source codes to their lockers and in orderto evaluate sources the teacher needs to down-load them, compile and run them on their localcomputers. This creates tedious and consider-able work for the teacher. In TeachCenter, aspecial kind of web services is used to automatethis process. Files having a certain extension,for example .c .f .java, may be associated withspecial web services. The web services use theSOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) formatto communicate and deliver sources to a spe-cial environment on another server where thesesources are compiled and executed. All outputsof compilation and execution of the program arereturned to TeachCenter as a text file and thistext file is saved in a locker. The teacher seesnot only a source code uploaded by students, butalso the results of the practical running of themodules. In TeachCenter right now we have ex-perience with the following programming mod-ules: FORTRAN, C, C++, Java, Mat-lab andSQL. For these types of files there is a spe-cial web service which performs all previouslymentioned actions.

9. Format Conversion Using Web Services

In this section we will discuss the benefits aswell as dangers of integrating cloud services ina Learning Management System. First of all,we list the positive facts:

Figure 7. Remote Evaluation Interface of TeachCenter.

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1. Acceptance: There is just one very convinc-ing fact: students simply love it. A couple ofevaluations (Ebner et al., 2013) (Ebner et al.,2014) pointed out that Dropbox is in generala heavily used application for students at theuniversity. Besides Facebook, it is the mostused and well-known platform, due to thefact that working in groups is much easierwith a central synchronized folder. Further-more, explicit evaluations show that usersof the LMS rate this feature especially asvery high (Stantchev et al., 2014). Finally,the number of folders connected to the LMSsupport this feedback. Students stated it isa power feature, because just a few clicksare needed to get all content from the LMSto their personal Dropbox folders and just afew more to share it with their colleagues. Itis easy.

On the other side, lecturers tend to ne-glect this possibility. The idea is that theycan also bind their Dropbox folder to theLMS. If there is any file changed in theDrop-box, it will be automatically synchronized.From our point of view we see a gap in dig-ital literacy between teachers and students.For students, using Dropbox or similar ap-plications is part of their daily (school-)life.Teachers are less familiar with collaborationtools.

2. Learning Behavior: Due to the fact that thetools are highly accepted by learners, notonly the usability and the pace to get the dataare crucial, but also the personal learning be-havior. Today each single learner is addictedto a number of digital applications assistingtheir daily routine. For example, the smartphone functioning as an mp3-player, gameconsoles as well as phones and so on. Foryears the term “personal learning environ-ment” has been discussed in the scientificcommunity and is seen as the summary ofall digital applications used for learning, ar-ranged in a specific form (Attwell, 2007).In other words, cloud services are part of to-day’s personal learning behavior and shouldtherefore be supported by educational insti-tutions as well.

3. Learning Scenarios: A further positive factis that collaboration tools allow in generalnew didactical scenarios. For example, edit-ing a document in real-time by different

learners had not been possible before Ether-pad or Google Drive was offered. Today,essays, protocols, and notes can be writtencollaboratively in a timely manner. It mustbe pointed out that such things were not pos-sible before and that they allow new didacti-cal approaches. Therefore it is important toassist teachers and learners with the integra-tion into the LMS. For example, one lectureused the Etherpad extensively for writing es-says by a groups of students. The teacherof the lecture stated that he benefited fromit through the synchronization of the docu-ments. He always knows the status of eachsingle project. If the process of a documentis essential for the final exam, cloud servicesmight help.

Furthermore, there are also some negative factsabout the use of cloud services:

1. Reliability: First of all, if a cloud service isdown, no document will be available. If thishappens once, it will be forgotten in the longrun, but if it happens often, this is indeed ahuge problem. If a teachers plans to do acollaborative work and it is simply not pos-sible, they will maybe never use this serviceagain. From a teacher’s perspective the ser-vice must be reliable and from a university’sperspective, this means taking responsibilityin the long run and paying for the service. Itis risky to use free services for education ifthere is no alternative.

2. Legal Issues (Privacy and copyright): Legalissues are very important, especially in Eu-rope and in German speaking areas. Firstof all, educational institutions have to guar-antee that no personal data can be accessedby a non-authorized third party institution.In other words, storing personal data aboutstudents (assessments, names etc.) on cloudservices might be a problem. Furthermore,teachers are obliged to store all data whichwas part of the final grade for at least twoyears. If they are not able to retrieve the datain case of a student’s request, the universityis in serious trouble. Second, there are alsocopyright issues. If, for example, studentsdownload presentations or any content fromtheLMS to theDropboxwithout explicit per-mission of the author, this would lead to aviolation of the copyright law. Furthermore,any sharing, remixing or even republishing

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makes it even worse. The only chance toavoid such situations is to provide Open Ed-ucational Resources within the LMS, allow-ing use of the content for learning purposes(Schaffert, 2010).

3. Third Party Dependence: Another issue isthe dependence on the third party applica-tion. For example, the cloud service changesits API, which must be adopted within a veryshort time frame in the LMS. Otherwise,users will not trust the service any more.Especially free services may change theirpolicy or their business models. It could bepossible that some features must be paid infuture otherwise files cannot be download-able. Such situations can drastically changethe view on cloud services.

10. Conclusion

As already mentioned, we followed the infor-mation systems prototyping approach. Our con-clusion is that it was the right choice and wehave shown the advantages of cloud services inmodern LMS. We have briefly described a num-ber of functional components of a modern LMSbased on cloud services. Of course, the num-ber of such components is not limited to justthe few described here. Cloud services are alsoused in order to share course calendars, educa-tional picture galleries and access to social net-work components such as blogs, Facebook andTwitter. One of the rather popular applicationsof blogs and Twitter in LMS is providing livenews feeds for students. The number of applica-tions of modern cloud services will significantlygrow in the near future. The advantage of usingsuch services is obvious. Cloud services pro-vide a very convenient environment for editing,uploading and downloading content. For exam-ple, as it was mentioned earlier, Dropbox can besimply synchronized with the local file systemand thus editing of remote materials becomesequal to editing local materials. Editing of pic-ture galleries such as Picasa and Facebook canbe done directly as you make snapshots on yourmobile device. Introducing cloud services intothe daily work of teachers spares them tediouswork for uploading and upgrading materials forstudents. At the same time, the use of cloudservices faces serious obstacles from technicaland legal perspectives.

From the technical perspective, the main prob-lem is the dependency of the LMS on third partyservices. Obviously, if you reuse any kind ofcloud services you expect it to be up and run-ning 24 hours a day, which is not always thecase. Another issue is the API (Applicationprogramming interface) which is used for com-munication from the LMS to cloud services.Such interfaces are permanently under develop-ment and not always backward compatible. Inother words, if the API version 0.1 of Dropboxwas used for communicating to the Dropbox,it becomes obsolete when version 1.0 appears.For example, we were unpleasantly surprisedin the middle of the term when all interfacesto user Dropboxes stopped working. Legal is-sues are mainly rotating the copyright permis-sions to share materials on cloud services. Thusstudents who upload materials to their Drop-box and would like teachers to access thesematerials, sometimes disagree with saving allcredentials needed on TeachCenter to accesstheir Dropbox. In the future, we expect signif-icant development, especially in sharing accessto cloud services and solving all legal issuesrelated to using these services for educationalpurposes.

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Received: October, 2014Accepted: October, 2014

Contact addresses:

Alexei ScerbakovTechnische Universitat Graz

Munzgrabenstrae 35aA-8010 Graz, Austria

e-mail: [email protected]

Martin EbnerTechnische Universitat Graz

Munzgrabenstrae 35aA-8010 Graz, Austria

e-mail: [email protected]

Nikolai ScerbakovTechnische Universitat Graz

Munzgrabenstrae 35aA-8010 Graz, Austria

e-mail: [email protected]

ALEXEI SCERBAKOV is currently a master student at Graz University ofTechnology. He is also working as a programmer at the Departmentfor Social Learning. Alexei is a developer of a number of eLearningplatforms that are used by different departments to provide electronicservices for students, as well as life-long learning and massive openonline courses (MOOCs) for users world-wide. He is currently doinghis master thesis which is strongly focused on different aspects of theusage of cloud services in learning management systems.

MARTIN EBNER is currently head of the Department for Social Learn-ing at Graz University of Technology and therefore responsible for alluniversity wide e-learning activities. He holds an Assoc. Prof. on me-dia informatics and works also at the Institute for Information SystemComputer Media as senior researcher. His research focuses strongly one-learning, mobile learning, learning analytics, social media and OpenEducational Resources. Martin has given a number of lectures in thisarea as well as workshops and keynotes at international conferences.For publications as well as further research activities, please visit hiswebsite: http://martinebner.at

NIKOLAI SCERBAKOV, Ao. Univ.-Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Dr.techn., AssistantProfessor of Computer Science at the Technical University of St. Pe-tersburg from 1977 to 1983. Ph.D. in Computer Science from theTechnical University of St. Petersburg in 1983. Associate Professorof Computer Science at the Technical University of St. Petersburgfrom 1983 to 1988. Full Professor of Applied Computer Science at theTechnical University of St. Petersburg since 1989.

Visiting Professor at the Graz University of Technology, Austria from1991 to 1994. Full-time employee (a.o. Univ.Professor) of the GrazUniversity of Technology since May 1995.

Author of four books and over 180 scientific contributions. Man-ager of a number of ambitious undertakings including object-orienteddatabase management system “INFOBANK”, multimedia authoringsystem “Hyper-PC”, fully-fledged hypermedia system “HM-Card” andLearning Management System “WBT-Master”.

Main research and project areas: hypermedia systems, distributeddatabase systems, expert systems, data models and their applications.

Technical leader of a number of European projects.