IEEE SCC 2015 Hot Topic Track - Open Education Resources as Services

A big challenge for modern learners and educators is
that the delivery methods of education services are rapidly changing.
Blended learning, which aims to integrate e-learning and open courses
with other learning modes, is vigorously pursued by many education
providers. It has become a reality for many regional universities or
universities with multi campus operations. Further, mobile learning
(m-learning) allows learners to participate in courses with mobile
devices, and access huge amount of materials from anywhere. A key
catalyst for m-learning to thrive is the services oriented and cloud
computing paradigms, which harness economic benefits of large scale
distributed systems, where computing resources are seamlessly integrated
across geographical boundaries. Learners now have numerous options to
access ‘big’ learning resources, whenever they want, wherever they are.



Another challenge facing educators is the exponential increase
of the quantity of available learning resources. A recent trend related
to this increase is that, as many leading universities open up access to
their courses, the massive open online course (MOOC) also gains wider
popularity in the whole higher and adult education sector. Using MOOC,
as claimed, anyone from anywhere is given the equal opportunity to take
courses and have access to open educational content that they otherwise
could not afford. However, many educational professionals are still
evaluating the cons and pros of the MOOC as a regular, or barely
complementary, pedagogical approach for m-learning.



These novel learning paradigms have attracted many education
providers’ and course instructors’ interests to discover a better way to
deliver the educational services and resources. They may also
incorporate the approaches that adopt collaborative techniques and build
virtual teams in order to conduct collaborative learning and accomplish
team assignments. However, there are still some barriers for course
instructors to adapt their previous teaching strategies to this new
blended learning environment. Despite the advantages of services
oriented and mobile cloud-based learning and forthcoming mobile apps,
learning resources for non-mobile devices cannot be directly adapted to
mobile devices due to their indeterminacies of context, such as
unpredictable network bandwidth, and specificities, such as different
operation systems. Learners may be at their wits end to choose which
courses to learn at first or next when there are many options to be
considered. In addition, enhancing learners’ teamwork performance in
collaborative learning plays a significant role when MOOC learners are
achieving their learning objectives as a group.





SCC-OERaS Hot Topic Track Chairs

Jun Shen, University of Wollongong, Australia

William Guo, Central Queensland University, Australia

Dongming Xu, University of Queensland, Australia

Chi-Hung Chung, CSIRO






This Hot Topic track seeks original contributions tackling the technical
issues in offering open education resources, such as MOOC, in the
context of services and cloud computing paradigms. The ultimate goal of
this research agenda is that every learner has seamless and efficient
access to open online courses. Novel solutions are sought for educator
providers and services providers to integrate the big open resources and
interoperable Internet services.



This Open Education Resources as Services (OERaS) track is a Hot
Topic track with a separate paper submission and review dates. However,
the OERaS papers will become part of the main track, thus the format and
quality of OERaS papers are expected to be consistent with that of main
track papers.




Submitted OERaS track manuscripts will be limited to 8 (IEEE Proceedings
style) pages and REQUIRED to be formatted using the IEEE Proceedings
template in WORD or Latex Package. Unformatted papers and papers beyond
the page limit will not be reviewed. Electronic submission of
manuscripts (in PDF or Word format) is required. Detailed instructions
for electronic paper preparation and submission, panel proposals,
tutorial proposals, workshop proposals, and review process can be found
at conference website.



At least one author of each accepted paper is required to register to the conference and present the paper.



OERaS Hot Topic Track Important Dates:


Full Paper Submission Due Date: April 5, 2015

Decision Notification (Electronic): April 25, 2015

Accepted Paper Camera-Ready Copy to the IEEE FTP Site Due Date: April 30, 2015