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- Title
NEW TRENDS IN THE EDUCATIONAL AREA. CASE STUDY REGARDING THE USABILITY OF GOOGLE APPS TOOLS WITHIN THE DEPARTMENT FOR DISTANCE LEARNING.
- Authors
LOGOFĂTU, Bogdan; VISAN, Andreea
- Abstract
At Stanford Commencement Address in 2005, Steve Jobs said: "You can't connect the dots looking forward you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future". In the 21st century everything is moving faster, an innovation is "new" only for a short period of time. These changes are affecting all areas, including education. But what if education develops its "future" by founding itself in the "past" again? Could the "yesterday" in which the Romanian education system has remained be the source of inspiration for the "tomorrow" that the present development promises? This paper is aiming to present the valuable journey that the Department for Distance Learning team has traveled since the starting point, in may 1999 and until now, a journey that hasn't yet reached the end. Over the years many valuable projects have been developed and implemented by CREDIS team (CREDIS is the acronym for the Department for Distance Learning): new higher education study programs (BA and MA) especially designed for pre-service and in-service school teachers; a new BA study program (240 ECTS) focusing on "Information Technology"; new LLL programs (CISCO Networking Academy, Microsoft IT Academy, ECDL), with the main purpose to find inspiration, answers and proposals for "tomorrow" education. The main interests of this paper are centered on the last years in which CREDIS team has focused on identifying, developing and promoting e-learning solutions in Romania. In this regard, one of the most important challenges was and it still is the cloud technology that has quickly replaced the traditional learning management system used in universities. Universities from all over the world are now using the cloud computing technology to improve collaboration between teachers and students, to increase the efficiency of their classroom but also to save costs without sacrificing privacy or security. Aligning with the directions recommended by the European Union on modernizations of higher education CREDIS has successfully implemented Google Apps tools within their students. Google Apps for Education (acronym GAFE) is a free cloud-based messaging and collaboration platform that includes mail, calendaring, IM, as well as Web-based collaborative documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and sites. Students' opinion regarding the opportunities provided by these applications on communication, file storage, collaborative documents, spreadsheets and presentation in a "cloud" campus will be presented in the paper.
- Subjects
ROMANIA; GOOGLE Workspace; DISTANCE education; EDUCATIONAL technology; TECHNOLOGICAL innovations; EDUCATION
- Publication
eLearning & Software for Education, 2015, Issue 2, p526
- ISSN
2066-026X
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.12753/2066-026X-15-171