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Top1. Introduction
Fundamentally, it can be deduced that E-learning relies on merging information and communications technology into the learning process to share and deliver specific curriculum material in all kinds of formats (e.g. videos, slideshows, documents, etc.) synchronously or asynchronously (Epignosis, 2014). There are many features in the E-learning system, which distinguish it from the traditional learning. E-learning adopts techniques that fit with different learning styles, including the use of complex digital content and innovative methods, to increase students' role in the learning process and to improve the quality of the interaction between students and instructors. On the other hand, e-learning does not restrict the student in time or place during the learning process.
In order to build an effective e-learning system, there is a need to integrate between the suitable information technology, learning contents and learning approaches as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1.
The main components of e-learning system
Technologies have a significant impact on improving the quality of electronic learning content; it can make the content presentations more slick and interesting, with high quality, graphically rich. Furthermore, the development of technologies led to develop variety types of the E-learning approaches (Epignosis, 2014). E-learning approaches represent all the theories, strategies, skills and attitudes that involved in teaching and learning environment. The appropriate e-learning approach has been chosen by the teacher or instructor according to the situation, students' needs, learning styles, and the particular learning context (Faraday, 211). Varity of the technologies can produce different e-learning approaches such as collaborative learning and social learning approaches that are based on using communication technologies as messaging and social networks, while other types of approaches can rely on the use of gaming technology such as micro-learning and gamification (Epignosis, 2014).
Thus, migration of the e-learning from solid media to interactive environment leads to generalize the next-generation of e-learning platforms which is based on applying service frameworks to their modular design, and supporting interoperable services (Zaslavsky, 2004) The Cloud computing is considered one of the best environments for sharing the services. In Cloud computing the computational resources and services reside in geographically distributed data centers, and dynamically provisioned and shared to achieve significant economies of scale. Cloud computing systems depend on the idea of the virtualization, and automated provisioning of services that increase the availability and connectivity with the Cloud’s users (El Attar, 2014; Shawish, 2014).
Therefore, integration between the learning approaches and the modern technologies has supported many aspects of E-learning. This integration reinforces and facilitates the social and collaborative activities among distant students while applying adaptive learning electronically addresses the cognitive differences among students. Thus, effective e-learning environment should base on integrating various approaches rather than adopting a single approach as well as, having a powerful and scalable infrastructure that accommodates the increasing growth of workloads. This paper presents a novel personal cloud-based learning environment that is based on benefiting from several e-learning approaches (e.g. collaborative, social, and personalized learning) and integrating them into an effective virtual learning environment hosted over cloud computing infrastructure to overcome the most popular challenges that face the e-learning systems.