Simulation techniques have become a powerful tool for deciding the best starting conditions on pay-as-you-go scenarios. This is the case of public cloud infrastructures, where a given number and type of virtual machines (in short VMs) are instantiated during a specified time, being this reflected in the final budget. With this in mind, this paper introduces and validates iCanCloud, a novel simulator of cloud infrastruc-tures with remarkable features such as flexibility, scalability, performance and usability. Further-more, the iCanCloud simulator has been built on the following design principles: (1) it's targeted to conduct large experiments, as opposed to oth-ers simulators from literature; (2) it provides a flexible and fully customizable global hypervisor for integrating any cloud brokering policy; (3) it reproduces the instance types provided by a given cloud infrastructure; and finally, (4) it contains a user-friendly GUI for configuring and launching simulations, that goes from a single VM to large cloud computing systems composed of thousands of machines.Keywords Cloud computing · Cloud computing simulator · Cloud hypervisor · Validation · Scalability 1 to solve a given computational problem. If the same software and configurations are needed, the VMs may be started using the same image. This way, a machine offered by a computing cloud may become whatever the user needs, from a standalone computer to a cluster or Grid node.Nowadays, cloud computing systems are increasing their role due to the fast (r)evolution of computer networks and communication technologies. A very clear proof of this fact is that very important companies like Amazon, Google, Dell, IBM, and Microsoft are investing billions of dollars in order to provide their own cloud solutions [28].As soon as the scientific community had access to cloud production infrastructures, the first applications started to run on the cloud [26,34]. In many Research areas, the leap from traditional cluster and Grid computing to this new paradigm has been mandatory, being the main reason an evolution in the computational needs of the applications [10]. A remarkable fact from this evolution is that in a pre-cloud environment, hardware defines the level of parallelism of an application. In cloud computing, the level of parallelism is defined by the application itself, as there is no restriction in the number of machines, and CPU availability is 100% guaranteed by standard.There

Service-oriented e-learning platforms can be considered as a third generation of learning management systems (LMSs). As opposed to the previous generations, consisting of ad hoc solutions and traditional LMS, this new technology contemplates e-learning systems as services that can be integrated into different learning scenarios. This paper shows that the flexibility of these systems allows building personal learning environments and proposes the use of an extended technology acceptance model (TAM) to assess the acceptance and intention to use a third generation of LMS. To fit and validate the service-oriented e-learning platforms acceptance model, structural equation modeling and path analysis have been implemented. The results point out that the intention to use this third-generation LMS is determined by the gadgets and container design, both of which are structural elements of this technology. Finally, it is also shown that previous experience does not determine the use intention of this technology. IntroductionIn the past two decades, learning management systems (LMSs) have been major paradigms in the field of Internet-based education. Due to the technological evolution of these last years, three different generations of LMS platforms can be found, which can be characterized using several properties, among them were communication, interoperability and learning context, as shown in

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This paper analyzes students' self-perception of success and learning effectiveness after using non-compulsory gamification in an online Cybcourse. For this purpose, we designed a cybersecurity game based on cognitive constructivism learning theory. We built the game scenes using metaphors to present the main Cybersecurity contents to the students. We delivered the game in a regular course with two objectives: first, to find the primary design factors that affect students' self-perception of success. We propose a structural equation model to find out the elements with the most significant impact on the students' self-perception of success. The results show that the realistic game design and the contextualization of the game do have a notable influence. They are both examples of best practices in game design; second, to evaluate the learning effectiveness of the game. The results suggest a high correlation between playing the game and succeeding in the course. Moreover, chronological analysis of the performance reveals that the intention to play the game could be a simple dropout predictor. Thus, introducing the game in the educational curricula improves student engagement and consolidates their knowledge on cybersecurity.