CRIBEL: Lifelong learning social network governed by academic institutions: an affordable serverless model in the cloud

Abstract

Academic institutions, teachers, students and workers are facing important changes in the way they organise work and training in new skills demanded by companies in the face of the new challenges of society in general due to the digital transition. One of the accepted strategies for these subjects is the Lifelong Learning model that prepares them in knowledge, skills and competences they need to thrive in the labour market and in their personal and private life. Communication and motivation are key elements in the educational process in general and in Lifelong Learning in particular, and it is here where online social networks services (SNSs) are a tool of great potential in this sense given their capacity to offer information and contents, as well as to facilitate the interconnection between subjects involved in the process. But, are popular and public SNSs sites like Facebook, Twitter or Youtube the networks we need in our academic institutions? SNSs including Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter are widely used for educational purposes. And they have potential and interesting aspects. But of course, there are also difficulties associated with the use of these online social networks by academic institutions. Among the difficulties mentioned, we will focus on three categories. The first is the loss of student time filtering high quality and useful content for their training and the lack of expert guidance in this task. The second is the lack of control of the social network by the academic institution, which has little power of governance and decision-making in a social network such as Facebook or Twitter, governed by private entities according to non-educational interests. And the third is the economic cost and technical challenge for an academic institution to create and maintain its own online social network. We present a model of a new social network oriented to Lifelong Learning we have named Cribel, whose main characteristics are its simplicity and agility, its motivational elements of the user experience, the control of the quality of the contents, and its simplicity and low cost of implementation, maintenance, and automatic scaling due to its serverless design model in the cloud.