Extensible, Cloud-Based Open Environment for Remote Classes Reuse.

The purpose of the presented work was to foster the reuse of whole remote classes, including the workflows involving multiple tools used during the class. Such a functionality is especially useful for designing new classes and introducing new topics into curricula, which happens quite often in laboratory-based courses in the Information Technologies area. The proposed approach allows professors to shorten the time it takes to create remote collaboration environments designed and prepared by their peers, by integrating multiple tools in topic-oriented educational collaboration environments. To achieve that, we split the system, codenamed 'sozisel', into two parts - one of them responsible for facilitating creation of educational environments templates (models) describing the online class workflows composed of multiple tools, the other being responsible for executing the actual classes. For the environment to be extensible, we decided to use open, standards-based technologies only. This stands in contrast with most of commercially available environments, which are frequently based on proprietary technologies. The functional evaluation carried out on the sozisel prototype proved that the system does not require significant resources to be used in classes of medium size.