New short paper : “Designing a virtual laboratory for a relational database MOOC” with Vagrant, Debian, etc.

Here’s a short preview of our latest accepted paper (to appear at CSEDU 2015), about the construction of VMs for the Relational Database MOOC using Vagrant, Debian, PostgreSQL (previous post), etc. :

Designing a virtual laboratory for a relational database MOOC

Olivier Berger, J Paul Gibson, Claire Lecocq and Christian Bac

Keywords: Remote Learning, Virtualization, Open Education Resources, MOOC, Vagrant

Abstract: Technical advances in machine and system virtualization are creating opportunities for remote learning to provide significantly better support for active education approaches. Students now, in general, have personal computers that are powerful enough to support virtualization of operating systems and networks. As a conse- quence, it is now possible to provide remote learners with a common, standard, virtual laboratory and learning environment, independent of the different types of physical machines on which they work. This greatly enhances the opportunity for producing re-usable teaching materials that are actually re-used. However, configuring and installing such virtual laboratories is technically challenging for teachers and students. We report on our experience of building a virtual machine (VM) laboratory for a MOOC on relational databases. The architecture of our virtual machine is described in detail, and we evaluate the benefits of using the Vagrant tool for building and delivering the VM.

TOC :

  • Introduction
    • A brief history of distance learning
    • Virtualization : the challenges
    • The design problem
  • The virtualization requirements
    • Scenario-based requirements
    • Related work on requirements
    • Scalability of existing approaches
  • The MOOC laboratory
    • Exercises and lab tools
    • From requirements to design
  • Making the VM as a Vagrant box
    • Portability issues
    • Delivery through Internet
    • Security
    • Availability of the box sources
  • Validation
    • Reliability Issues with VirtualBox
    • Student feedback and evaluation
  • Future work
    • Laboratory monitoring
    • More modular VMs
  • Conclusions

Bibliography

  • Alario-Hoyos et al., 2014
    Alario-Hoyos, C., Pérez-Sanagustın, M., Kloos, C. D., and Muñoz Merino, P. J. (2014).
    Recommendations for the design and deployment of MOOCs: Insights about the MOOC digital education of the future deployed in MiríadaX.
    In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Technological Ecosystems for Enhancing Multiculturality, TEEM ’14, pages 403-408, New York, NY, USA. ACM.
  • Armbrust et al., 2010
    Armbrust, M., Fox, A., Griffith, R., Joseph, A. D., Katz, R., Konwinski, A., Lee, G., Patterson, D., Rabkin, A., Stoica, I., and Zaharia, M. (2010).
    A view of cloud computing.
    Commun. ACM, 53:50-58.
  • Billingsley and Steel, 2014
    Billingsley, W. and Steel, J. R. (2014).
    Towards a supercollaborative software engineering MOOC.
    In Companion Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 283-286. ACM.
  • Brown and Duguid, 1996
    Brown, J. S. and Duguid, P. (1996).
    Universities in the digital age.
    Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 28(4):11-19.
  • Bullers et al., 2006
    Bullers, Jr., W. I., Burd, S., and Seazzu, A. F. (2006).
    Virtual machines – an idea whose time has returned: Application to network, security, and database courses.
    SIGCSE Bull., 38(1):102-106.
  • Chen and Noble, 2001
    Chen, P. M. and Noble, B. D. (2001).
    When virtual is better than real [operating system relocation to virtual machines].
    In Hot Topics in Operating Systems, 2001. Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on, pages 133-138. IEEE.
  • Cooper, 2005
    Cooper, M. (2005).
    Remote laboratories in teaching and learning-issues impinging on widespread adoption in science and engineering education.
    International Journal of Online Engineering (iJOE), 1(1).
  • Cormier, 2014
    Cormier, D. (2014).
    Rhizo14-the MOOC that community built.
    INNOQUAL-International Journal for Innovation and Quality in Learning, 2(3).
  • Dougiamas and Taylor, 2003
    Dougiamas, M. and Taylor, P. (2003).
    Moodle: Using learning communities to create an open source course management system.
    In World conference on educational multimedia, hypermedia and telecommunications, pages 171-178.
  • Gomes and Bogosyan, 2009
    Gomes, L. and Bogosyan, S. (2009).
    Current trends in remote laboratories.
    Industrial Electronics, IEEE Transactions on, 56(12):4744-4756.
  • Hashimoto, 2013
    Hashimoto, M. (2013).
    Vagrant: Up and Running.
    O’Reilly Media, Inc.
  • Jones and Winne, 2012
    Jones, M. and Winne, P. H. (2012).
    Adaptive Learning Environments: Foundations and Frontiers.
    Springer Publishing Company, Incorporated, 1st edition.
  • Lowe, 2014
    Lowe, D. (2014).
    MOOLs: Massive open online laboratories: An analysis of scale and feasibility.
    In Remote Engineering and Virtual Instrumentation (REV), 2014 11th International Conference on, pages 1-6. IEEE.
  • Ma and Nickerson, 2006
    Ma, J. and Nickerson, J. V. (2006).
    Hands-on, simulated, and remote laboratories: A comparative literature review.
    ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 38(3):7.
  • Pearson, 2013
    Pearson, S. (2013).
    Privacy, security and trust in cloud computing.
    In Privacy and Security for Cloud Computing, pages 3-42. Springer.
  • Prince, 2004
    Prince, M. (2004).
    Does active learning work? A review of the research.
    Journal of engineering education, 93(3):223-231.
  • Romero-Zaldivar et al., 2012
    Romero-Zaldivar, V.-A., Pardo, A., Burgos, D., and Delgado Kloos, C. (2012).
    Monitoring student progress using virtual appliances: A case study.
    Computers & Education, 58(4):1058-1067.
  • Sumner, 2000
    Sumner, J. (2000).
    Serving the system: A critical history of distance education.
    Open learning, 15(3):267-285.
  • Watson, 2008
    Watson, J. (2008).
    Virtualbox: Bits and bytes masquerading as machines.
    Linux J., 2008(166).
  • Winckles et al., 2011
    Winckles, A., Spasova, K., and Rowsell, T. (2011).
    Remote laboratories and reusable learning objects in a distance learning context.
    Networks, 14:43-55.
  • Yeung et al., 2010
    Yeung, H., Lowe, D. B., and Murray, S. (2010).
    Interoperability of remote laboratories systems.
    iJOE, 6(S1):71-80.