Virtual Communities Using Cloud Technology

Colleges and universities need to keep up with the latest techniques in communication so that when students begin their educational pursuits they are using up-to-date technology. Not all colleges and universities have the flexibility and budgets to keep current on all forms of technologies but being able to provide students with available options will help colleges and universities to increase student population.

Colleges and universities have different options and not all technologies are costly to implement. The key question is: Once students are admitted and enrolled, can the colleges and universities keep them engaged in their academic pursuits? This can be a challenge; however, by offering new technological advances, this makes the offer and acceptance more binding since students want to be socially connected.

The virtual community can be a pretty powerful tool for communicating in today’s socially networked environment. There are many faces of socially connected networks that include Facebook, Myspace, or LinkedIn. Providing students an area where academic issues and discussions can ensue can encourage academic development. Developing a virtual community using a cloud service can socially increase networking interaction. This networking approach can also increase the performance of students and provide the services that the school may be able to offer at a lower cost to students.

This collaborative approach to learning can be useful for students, teachers, and staff as an interactive collaborative approach to virtual education. This book includes discussions and evaluation of virtual communities, cloud technology, use of virtual communities, challenges, advantages, e-collaboration, development, quality assurance planning, and future trends. The goal is to provide an introduction of the different areas noted above and plant a seed for considering how various virtual approaches to education could benefit the classroom.

Developing alternative approaches to education has become more and more predominant and has opened the door to learning in new environments. The purpose of this monograph is to provide readers with information that teachers, students, and staff can use for developing virtual communities using cloud technology. Teachers, students, and staff can develop a community of learning while sharing information and data.

This development can be based on best practices that are established for a virtual community. Cloud technology can be an asset for the storage of data and information that teachers, students, and staff can use since space may be limited on the school's servers. Information that has a focus on big data can become increasingly difficult to manage so data and the cloud may be considered a symbiotic pivotal technology for managing a large amount of data.