Automated Orchestration of Online Educational Collaboration in Cloud-based Environments

Integrated collaboration environments (ICEs) are widely used by corporations to increase productivity by fostering groupwide and interpersonal collaboration. In this article, we discuss the enhancements of such environment needed to build an educational ICE (E-ICE) that addresses the specific needs of educational users. The motivation for the research was the Malopolska Educational Cloud (MEC) project conducted by AGH University and its partners. The E-ICE developed by MEC project fosters collaboration between universities and high schools by creating an immersive virtual collaboration space. MEC is a unique project due to its scale and usage domain. Multiple online collaboration events are organized weekly between over 150 geographically scattered institutions. Such events, aside from videoconferencing, require various services. The MEC E-ICE is a complex composition of a significant number of services and various terminals that require very specific configuration and management. In this article, we focus on a model-driven approach to automating the organization of online meetings in their preparation, execution, and conclusion phases. We present a conceptual model of E-ICE-supported educational courses, introduce a taxonomy of online educational services, identify planes and modes of their operation, as well as discuss the most common collaboration patterns. The MEC E-ICE, which we present as a case study, is built in accordance with the presented, model-driven approach. MEC educational services are described in a way that allows for converting the declarative specification of E-ICE application models into platform-independent models, platform-specific models, and, finally, working sets of orchestrated service instances. Such approach both reduces the level of technical knowledge required from the end-users and considerably speeds up the construction of online educational collaboration environments.