Trends of Cloud Computing in Education

Yinghui Shi1, Harrison Hao Yang1,2,*, Zongkai Yang1,and Di Wu1

1
Central China Normal University, 430079 Wuhan, China
2
State University of New York at Oswego, 13126 Oswego, USA
ikki.shi@hotmail.com, harrison.yang@oswego.edu,
zkyang@mail.ccnu.edu.cn, dr.wudi@gmail.com

Abstract. As an emerging technology, cloud computing has been increasingly

and widely used in the field of education. Based upon 132 research studies on
education of cloud computing from the Education Resources Information
Center database over the recent years, this study selected 42 high-frequency
descriptors to conduct co-word analysis of cloud computing in education. The
results show that cloud computing in education is mainly concentrated on five
areas: conceptual and pedagogical aspects, educational applications, processing
of information and resources, pros and cons of cloud computing in education,
and database management system integrated with cloud-based services. In
addition, it provides a detailed discussion of the impact of cloud computing in
these five areas.

Keywords: cloud computing, educational technology, focal themes, co-word

analysis, web services.

1 Introduction
Cloud computing is one of the biggest tech buzzwords nowadays. Interestingly, a
recent survey conducted by Wakefield Research for Citrix with 1,006 nationally
representative American adults about cloud computing revealed, “The majority of
Americans (54%) claim to never use the cloud, however 95% of those who think
they’re not using the cloud, actually are: 65% are banking online, 63% have shopped
online, 58% report using social networking sites, 45% have played online g ames,
29% store photos online, 22% have stored music or videos online, and nearly 1 in 5
(19%) use online file-sharing services - all of these are cloud-based” [1].
Cloud computing is not a totally new concept, and it has intricate connection to other
related technologies such as utility computing, cluster computing, and distributed
systems [2]. The concept of cloud computing may have originally been introduced as
long ago as 1961 when renowned computer scientist John McCarthy predicted that
computing would become a public utility [3]. The term cloud computing was inspired
by the cloud graphic that seen as a metaphor for the Internet, as cloud computing relies
on the use of computing resources and applications that are delivered as a service over
the Internet [4]. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) signals that

*
Corresponding author.

S.K.S. Cheung et al. (Eds.): ICHL 2014, LNCS 8595, pp. 116–128, 2014.
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
 Trends of Cloud Computing in Education 117

cloud computing is composed of five essential characteristics from on-demand self-

service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured service;
three service models such as Software as a Service - SaaS, Platform as a Service - PaaS,
and Infrastructure as a Service - IaaS; and four deployment models including private
cloud, community cloud, public cloud, and hybrid cloud [5].
As an emerging technology that has sparked the interest of a wide range of
individuals and organizations, cloud computing has changed the way people think
about computing and communication, data processing, and collaborative work [6].
Cloud computing enables individuals (e.g., teachers, students) and institutions (e.g.,
K-12 schools, colleges, universities) to access to these resources by offering a huge
amount of compute and storage resources to the masses [7]. An important step was
taken with the release of a cloud-based application named Google Apps in 2007,
which is offered free to educational institutions. Inevitably and fortunately, Google is
not the only cloud on the horizon, other cloud computing vendors, such as Amazon,
IBM, Microsoft, are keeping in step with Google [8].
In educational contexts, cloud computing has been thought to have tremendous
potential to improve efficiency and reduce costs with respect to the installation and
maintenance of variety educational services [8]. Cloud computing solutions are
employed by more and more schools to provide available cloud-based applications
and services for teachers and students, whereas what remains to be increased is the
capacity for the cloud to enhance students’ engagement in real research and
participation in global learning communities [9]. Cloud computing is becoming an
increasingly popular and powerful approach to delivering technology to educational
contexts. However, numerous factors from student and school’s perspective should be
paid careful attention to which helps contribute to the successful implementation of
cloud computing in the educational settings [10].
While cloud computing spreads rapidly in education, there are several questions
that have arisen from this growth. What is the overall impact of cloud computing in
the field of education? What are the focal aspects of cloud computing that researchers
and practitioners have been concerning with? In order to shed light on these questions
and have a better understanding of cloud computing on teaching and learning, this
study intends to provide an overall and intuitive analysis of research hotspots and
development trends in the field of education of cloud computing in recent years.
The purpose of this study is two-fold. First, it provides an overview of the
synthesis of key ideas, evidences, and works on cloud computing in education.
Second, it provides a further discussion for researchers and practitioners to gain deep
understanding and insights on cloud computing in education, and to assist them in
thinking about what they are trying to do and what they hope to achieve as they
integrate cloud computing services into teaching and learning.

2 Method

Co-word analysis method is used for this study. Co-word analysis method originally
appeared in the late 1970s, and it has been widely applied in many fields, such as
artificial intelligence, information retrieval, etc. Co-word analysis method is a
comprehensive analysis method based on co-occurrence frequency of pairs of words