Salvador Ros

Using Virtualization and Automatic Evaluation: Adapting Network Services Management Courses to the EHEA

This paper outlines the adaptation of a course on the management of network services in operating systems, called NetServicesOS, to the context of the new European Higher Education Area (EHEA). NetServicesOS is a mandatory course in one of the official graduate programs in the Faculty of Computer Science at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), Madrid, Spain, the Spanish University for Distance Education. Since UNED is a distance university, this course is taught entirely online. The adaptation process includes the implementation of continuous assessment, a key feature in EHEAs methodology. This learning-teaching methodology is driven by a set of student activities that implement the continuous assessment. For this, a virtual machine-based framework was defined, and an automatic evaluation system implemented. The evaluation system can handle the large student numbers characteristic of distance learning. If the set of proposed activities had to be performed in person on site, significant resources would have been necessary since many computer laboratories would have been required to accommodate all the students. Furthermore, the proposed framework ensures that students can perform the practical work simply and flexibly, without the need for large computing platforms.

Virtual Communities Adapted to the EHEA in an Enterprise Distance e-Learning Based Environment

This paper describes the e-learning architecture of the National Spanish Distance Learning University of Spain (UNED). The UNED has more than 200,000 users of e-learning systems (most of them, students) so it needed an enterprise architecture in order to ensure the performance of the virtual campus. The core of virtual campus is aLF (active learning framework) supported by dotLRN/OpenACS open source framework that provides the e-learning core services. aLF is was modified to support the EHEA learning model, based in activity curricula, providing full integration with the evaluation model of aLF and three new tools to focus on the student tasks planning.

Shareable educational architectures for remote laboratories

The proliferation of remote laboratories in multiple disciplines of science has removed the cost and administration burdens that hinder the adoption of practical sessions in engineering education. Remote laboratories provide online workbenches unconstrained by neither temporal nor geographical considerations and allow an interactive learning that maintains student attention. Recently, remote laboratories have been developed at multiple universities and adopted in engineering education. Furthermore, some of these laboratories are replicated at many universities such as the electronic circuits remote labs: NetLab, VISIR, and labs based on NI ELVIS II. This was the commence of a new mainstream which advocates a better remodeling of those laboratories to allow their allocation, sharing among universities, and their communication with other heterogeneous systems, e.g., Learning Management Systems (LMS). In this context, numerous sharable educational architectures for remote labs integration have emerged such as LiLa, Lab2go, ISILab, DCL, WebLab Deusto, iLab (ISA), and Labshare (Sahara). This paper reports on the emerging solutions for remote laboratories implementation and deployment in engineering education in an efficient way. The paper discusses different integration scenarios pointing out features, limitations, and upcoming challenges.

Harnessing clouds for e-learning: New directions followed by UNED

In this paper, we present our work on enhancing the technological infrastructure at Spanish National University for Distance Education (UNED, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia) with cloud computing principles. This includes the development of (1) virtualized environments to allow students to do practical exercises easily in the field of networks and communications; and (2) load forecasting techniques to improve on the usage of the technological infrastructures of UNED, so that the Quality of Service (QoS) experienced by users is kept and power consumption is minimized.

The UNED's interoperable virtual campus service management architecture

The creation and maintenance of a virtual campus is a task that not only implies the deployment of sophisticated hardware and software but also requires considerable effort in the integration of the main university management systems with the chosen teaching tools present in the campus. Such integration requires the definition of a range of services tailored for the different user profiles. Hence, it has been necessary to develop a management environment for the virtual campus that enables it to be manipulated and controlled in an efficient manner where new services (above and beyond the basic e-Learning platform tools) can be integrated in a seamless fashion. The implementation of these services should guarantee a large degree of interoperability among virtual learning environments, VLEs and tools. To this end, some of these services have been implemented using the IMS Enterprise standard. This standard essentially contributes to the organization of a given e-Learning platform in terms of users, courses and roles therein; leaving to one side the formalization of other services more specific to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) together with the current technological framework.

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.

Deconstructing remote laboratories to create Laboratories as a Service (LaaS)

The creation and publication of utilities as services (the most widely known being Infrastructure as a Service, IaaS, Platform as a Service, PaaS, and Software as a Service, SaaS) has been a hot topic of research and development for the recent years. They allow easy creation and deployment of infrastructures and applications which increase the versatility and usefulness of the Information Technology (IT) budgets of institutions that implement them. Therefore, this paper proposes the development of Laboratories as a Service (LaaS), which allow users of remote laboratories create versatile experiments adapted to their needs. These will be based on the deconstruction of remote laboratories, creation of clients, and selection of a container. An aeolian laboratory based on the Lego Mindstorms robotic kit is used as an example.

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.