Llanos Tobarra

Choosing the right LMS: A performance evaluation of three open-source LMS

Learning Management Systems (LMSs) are Information Technology (IT) platforms whose aim is the support of learning processes. Among the features a LMS provides we can find communication tools such as forums, evaluation tools such as questionnaires, or grade tools. A number of LMSs exist, both open-source (such as .LRN, Sakai, or Moodle) and proprietary solutions (such as Blackboard). Among the wide variety of existing LMSs, a crucial question that arises is, which LMS is more suitable for my necessities? This paper strives at answering this question based on a performance evaluation that compares three of the most widely used open-source LMS, namely .LRN, Sakai, and Moodle.

Online laboratories as a cloud service developed by students

On-line laboratories (virtual or remote) are widely used in experimental engineering subjects as part of the learning process. In order to develop these laboratories, a development framework called RELATED (Remote Laboratories exTendED) is used by the Communications and Control System Department of the Spanish University for Distance Education of Spain (UNED). This framework defines a structured and methodological development procedure, allowing the students the generation of their own laboratories. Once the laboratory is developed (based in its components), students have to configure their own computing resources in order to make their labs available. However, several problems must be faced by students in the “deployment” of their labs: network configuration, hardware availability, and so on. So, in order to solve these problems, an automatic system based on cloud providers is defined to allow students having their own cloud network/resources for their developed labs. This system simplifies the lab deployment and avoids common errors/mistakes in the development of laboratories with RELATED.

Generic integration of remote laboratories in public learning tools: Organizational and technical challenges

Educational remote laboratories are software and hardware tools that allow students to remotely access real equipment located in universities as if they were in a hands-on-lab session. Federations of these remote laboratories have existed for years, focused on allowing two universities to share their equipment. Additionally, the integration of remote laboratories in Learning Tools-LT-(Learning Management Systems, Content Management Systems or Personal Learning Environments) has been achieved in the past in order to integrate remote laboratories as part of the learning curricula, being part of the practice exercises or even as a tool of evaluation. An cross-institutional initiative called gateway4labs has been created to perform this integration through federation protocols. In this contribution, this initiative adds support for OpenSocial as a new protocol for Learning Tools (in particular, for EPFL Graasp), as well as for the iLab Shared Architecture (in addition to WebLab-Deusto and UNR FCEIA laboratories already supported). Supporting OpenSocial opens a number of new technical and organizational challenges since public labs should be supported without registering students, teachers or schools. The focus of this contribution is to show these challenges and how they are tackled in the proposed open source implementation.

VirTUal remoTe labORatories Management System (TUTORES): Using Cloud Computing to Acquire University Practical Skills

The use of practical laboratories is a key in engineering education in order to provide our students with the resources needed to acquire practical skills. This is specially true in the case of distance education, where no physical interactions between lecturers and students take place, so virtual or remote laboratories must be used. UNED has developed a system to create and manage virtual remote laboratories, aimed at improving the way how practical exercises are conducted. This system is based on cloud computing and virtualization concepts. These Virtual Remote Laboratories (VRLabs) combine features of traditional virtual and remote laboratories but with clear differences over them, among others, VRLabs do not necessarily access real physical devices but are not based on simulations either. Each student is provided with a virtual remote laboratory based on virtualization that he/she will access through the Internet and will use to implement his/her practical assignments. We present details on how these laboratories are implemented for a subject in a post-degree program in our University. Furthermore, we also present an evaluation of the system used on such subject aiming at assessing the quality of the system regarding three different concepts, namely perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and perceived interaction. This evaluation is twofold, first, we have conducted a survey over the students of the subject, and second, we have performed another survey over the teaching team of the subject, both have been performed for the 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 academic years.

Low-cost remote laboratories for renewable energy in distance education

Remote laboratories are nowadays essential in distance learning, as our case is, since students are not able to use face-to-face traditional laboratories. These remote laboratories can be employed by teacher within virtual classrooms, so that students can carry out their on-line experiments from anywhere and at anytime. The main drawback of these kinds of laboratories is their cost; this is more noticeable in the field of renewable energy. For this reason, this work proposes the use of low-cost remote laboratories, aimed at the study of solar and wind renewable energy. The described remote laboratory is based on using the popular robotic kit, named Lego Mindstorms NXT v2.0. robotic kit, which allows teachers to have flexibility when designing the laboratory and adapt it to the educational necessities of a course. The programming of these laboratories has been performed by using RESTful web services with Lab VIEW, a novel approach that enables users the creation of multiplatform laboratories.

Middleware solutions for service-oriented remote laboratories: A review

The evolution of Web 3.0 and consequently eLearning 3.0 have demanded a major change of the way learning objects are provided and implemented. It is foreseen that learning objects in eLearning 3.0 should be interoperable and easily discovered, and will represent any kind of virtual or physical object. Several approaches attempted to implement remote Laboratories as a Service (LaaS) in order to achieve such interoperability and to allow their integration into heterogeneous educational systems for pedagogical purposes and for more convenience, as well as, their coupling and mashing up with other learning objects in order to yield a scaffold and rich educational environment. This paper provides a broad study on the available middleware solutions for service-oriented remote laboratories implementation, emphasizing the pros and cons of each and the upcoming challenges in developing service-oriented remote laboratories.

A distributed laboratory architecture for game based learning in cybersecurity and critical infrastructures

This paper shows a design based on distributed architectures for a remote laboratory to learn cybersecurity and infrastructure protection systems. Distributed architectures, especially those supported by virtualization and cloud computing, along with other emerging technologies such as Game-based Learning (GBL), currently are a hot trend in educational and professional fields. Around this idea, a key is the concept of educational piece as meaning an element of instructional design where is including a suitable game. Therefore, each piece is characterized. These points among others allow us to plan the game-based lab design and to determine most appropriate time for each learning activity. Eventually, a game-piece-based architecture is able to deploy a kind of laboratories on cybersecurity and critical infrastructures, but that can be generalized for educational activities in other fields. This method provides a coherent reasoning to learning objectives and enough flexibility within a teaching program. In order to get a consistent and effective overcome, a laboratory implementation requires nowadays communication systems, hosts, some virtualization or cloud services, particularly for remote learning, but even for improving the traditional computer classrooms.

Integration of Multiple Data Sources for predicting the Engagement of Students in Practical Activities

This work presents the integration of an automatic assessment system for virtual/remote laboratories and the institutional Learning Management System (LMS), in order to analyze the students� progress and their collaborative learning in virtual/remote laboratories. As a result of this integration, it is feasible to extract useful information for the characterization of the students� learning process and detecting the students� engagement with the practical activities of our subjects. From this integration, a dashboard has been created to graphically present to lecturers the analyzed results. Thanks to this, faculty can use the analyzed information in order to guide the learning/teaching process of each student. As an example, a subject focused on the configuration of network services has been chosen to implement our proposal.

Developing Metacognitive Skills for Training on Information Security

This paper aims to describe a change in teaching practice of information security in college by presenting metacognitive aspects. From a constructivist view, students have to find a way for themselves and teachers have to serve as guidance in that teaching-learning process. Here we show some strategies in a framework to achieve in the field of cybersecurity based on our experience.

Work in progress: On the improvement of STEM education from preschool to elementary school

One of the key competences for Europe in the 21st Century is the technological competence understood as an instrument for development, aimed at encouraging society to use and like science. This competence can only be fully achieved by using practical experiments, which present use cases in a realistic, creative, and revolutionary way. This paper presents our work on the development of practical experiments in the context of several pre-university levels, from pre-school to elementary school, aimed at enhancing the appeal of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) among students.