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Cloud education environments consider all the cloud services, such as Web 2.0 applications, content, or infrastructure services. These services form an e-learning ecosystem which can be built upon the learning objectives and the preferences of the learner group. A great variety of existing cloud services might be repurposed for educational activities and it can be taken advantage from already widely used services without steep learning curves on their adoption. In this article is presented the design, deployment and evaluation of learning activities using cloud applications and services. The experiences presented here are from Galileo University in Guatemala with students from three different countries in Central America and Spain. This study reports findings from motivational attitudes, emotional aspects and usability perception. Selected cloud-based tools were used for the different learning activities in three courses in various application domains. These activities include collaboration, knowledge representation, storytelling activities and social networking. Experimentation results obtained aim to demonstrate that students are eager to use and have new and more interactive ways of learning, which challenges their creativity and group organization skills, while professors have a growing interest on using new tools and resources that are easy to use, mix and reuse. Thus, future research should focus on incentives for motivating participation as well as on providing systems with high usability, accessibility and interoperability that are capable of doing learning orchestration.

The research area of self-regulated learning (SRL) has shown the importance of the learner’s role in their cognitive and meta-cognitive strategies to self-regulate their learning. One fundamental step is to self-assess the knowledge acquired, to identify key concepts, and review the understanding about them. In this paper, we present an experimental setting in Guatemala, with students from several countries. The study provides evaluation results from the use of an enhanced automatic question creation tool (EAQC) for a self-regulated learning online environment. In addition to assessment quality, motivational and emotional aspects, usability, and tasks value are addressed. The EAQC extracts concepts from a given text and automatically creates different types of questions based on either the self-generated concepts or on concepts supplied by the user. The findings show comparable quality of automatically and human generated concepts, while questions created by a teacher were in part evaluated higher than computer-generated questions. Whereas difficulty and terminology of questions were evaluated equally, teacher questions where considered to be more relevant and more meaningful. Therefore, future improvements should especially focus on these aspects of questions quality.