Collaborative learning: A new horizon for E-learning in Sultan Qaboos University using concepts of MOOC and cloud computing

Abstract

The number of students using E-learning in the universities and colleges around the world has been increasing at massive level in the past years as a result of an easy access to higher educational resources via the internet. On the contrary, the number of instructors in most universities is increasing slowly. Because of the lack of employment opportunities in relation to the economic crisis experienced by some countries. As a consequence, instructional problems have appeared because of the lack of unsatisfactory support to students during E-learning procedure. Collaborative Learning (CL) has been recommended as a solution to this problem. This paper provides a new horizon of E-learning for collaborative learning using Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) concepts and cloud computing to solve this problem. Modes of learning have been proposed with case studies in Sultan Qaboos University (SQU) to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed modes.