Rémi Venant

Lab4CE: a Remote Laboratory for Computer Education

Remote practical activities have been demonstrated to be efficient when learners come to acquire inquiry skills. In computer science education, virtualization technologies are gaining popularity as this technological advance enables instructors to implement realistic practical learning activities, and learners to engage in authentic and problem-based learning. However, virtualization solutions have not been designed especially for education and do not address any pedagogical concern. Since several large-scale studies showed that instructional supports during practical activities are almost as important as technical features, this article investigates the following research question: how the scaffolding around the lab increases students’ engagement in remote practical learning of computer science? To answer this question, we introduce the Lab4CE environment, a remote laboratory for computer education which adopts a distributed, modular and flexible architecture to integrate a set of scaffolding tools and services intended for instructors and learners. An exploratory study conducted with 139 undergraduate students enrolled in the first year of a computer science degree suggests a positive effect of the framework on learners’ engagement when they come to practice system administration, and reveals a significant positive correlation between students’ activity within the system and students’ learning achievement.

Using Sequential Pattern Mining to Explore Learners’ Behaviors and Evaluate Their Correlation with Performance in Inquiry-Based Learning

This study analyzes students’ behaviors in a remote laboratory environment in order to identify new factors of prediction of academic success. It investigates relations between learners’ activities during practical sessions, and their performance at the final assessment test. Based on learning analytics applied to data collected from an experimentation conducted with our remote lab dedicated to computer education, we discover recurrent sequential patterns of actions that lead us to the definition of learning strategies as indicators of higher level of abstraction. Results show that some of the strategies are correlated to learners’ performance. For instance, the construction of a complex action step by step, or the reflection before submitting an action, are two strategies applied more often by learners of a higher level of performance than by other students. While our proposals are domain-independent and can thus apply to other learning contexts, the results of this study led us to instrument for both students and instructors new visualization and guiding tools in our remote lab environment.

How to Leverage Reflection in Case of Inquiry Learning? The Study of Awareness Tools in the Context of Virtual and Remote Laboratory

In this paper we design a set of awareness and reflection tools aiming at engaging learners in the deep learning process during a practical activity carried out through a virtual and remote laboratory. These tools include: (i) a social awareness tool revealing to learners their current and general levels of performance, but also enabling the comparison between their own and their peers’ performance; (ii) a reflection-on-action tool, implemented as timelines, allowing learners to deeply analyze both their own completed work and the tasks achieved by peers; (iii) a reflection-in-action tool acting as a live video player to let users easily see what others are doing. An experimentation involving 80 students was conducted in an authentic learning setting about operating system administration; the participants evaluated the system only slightly higher than traditional computational environments when it comes to leverage reflection and critical thinking, even if they evaluated the system as good in terms of usability.

A Help Management System to Support Peer Instruction in Remote Laboratories

Help between peers, intended to positively influence learning, appears as a suitable activity for inquiry learning. While several studies reveal evidence that effective help-seeking and help-giving behaviors can improve learning, virtual and remote laboratories do not provide sufficient support to enable these social interactions. Based on a set of criteria defined from existing literature, we designed a management system and implemented it in Lab4CE, a remote laboratory environment for Computer Education. The first results of two experimentations reveal that learners do not tend to help each other spontaneously, while the presence of a teacher increases self-confidence on help given.

A Competency-Based Model to Bridge the Gap between Academic Trainings and Industrial Trades

Within todays European socioeconomic context, supporting careers choices and occupational integration has become a major challenge. Education has to fit the changes of industry and job market, but this process requires a unified representation of professions and training programs. The competency concept appears to be a common vector, since it has turned to be a pervasive idea. Although industry has started specifying trades through competencies, similar attempts are not initiated for education yet. In this paper, we present a unifying model for training programs, professions and learners, built around competencies. Based on this model, several tools have been developed to help (1) educational teams to make sure that conceptions of curriculum fit the targeted learning objectives, (2) learners to make their careers choices through life easier, (3) industrial actors to identify training programs matching with their needs.