Towards cloud learning with ETC and Jazzhub

Collaboration is considered as a teaching strategy but, in many cases such as in the programming and software engineering classes, collaboration has to be a learning outcome itself, since students must acquire a specific ability in team working. Thus a suited working environment is needed, that has to be much more than just a flexible Learning Management System. Consequently, a specific project has been launched within the Eclipse italian community in the framework of the Enforcing Team Cooperation (ETC) activity. The aim of the project is that of enforcing and enlarging cooperation activities among a large number of students, all attending programming and software engineering courses at different Universities in Italy. The main idea behind the project is the implementation of a really effective Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) paradigm, to be used for higher education on team cooperation, in software engineering classes for the analysis, design, and development of software programs along their lifecycle. The project, in cooperation with IBM Italy as part of IBM's Academic Initiative and the Italian Eclipse community, has obtained interesting results so far as to build a migration of it into JazzHub IBM cloud platform. In addition, the cloud technology looks promising in order to improve cooperation and formation of student groups on specific objectives besides providing valuable support to the construction of virtual laboratories. This paper will discuss both innovations that cloud technology can provide the teaching of programming and software engineering, and first impressions of students and researchers who have used it.