Collaborative Proposal: Technologies for Improving Laboratory Experiences in Advanced Technical Education

Washington University, Saint Louis MO

Investigators

Abstract

The purpose of this project is to develop technologies for improving laboratory experiences in advanced technical education through the use of internet-accessible, virtual laboratory facilities. Laboratory experiences are a central component of advanced technical education, allowing students to see how what they are learning in the classroom can be put it into practice, enabling them to appreciate the real-world implications of what can seem like very abstract concepts. While the importance of labs is taken for granted by university faculty, the quality of laboratory experiences is highly variable. Reasons for this include the limited understanding of how students learn from lab assignments and the kinds of experiences that are most effective in achieving educational objectives, the time demands that lab assignments place on both faculty and students and the high cost of laboratory facilities, which makes it difficult to maintain adequate facilities for advanced courses. The project seeks to address these issues in the context of advanced technical courses in networking, using an existing facility, called the Open Network Laboratory (ONL). ONL has proved to be a valuable educational tool that allows students in advanced networking and information technology courses to have a substantial laboratory experience that builds upon and strengthens their classroom instruction. ONL is built around a set of extensible, gigabit routers and allows remote users to perform a wide range of experiments and demonstrations, allowing them to directly observe the effects of various parameters on system behavior. This allows them to compare observed behavior with behavior predicted by analytical methods or simulation, helping them to solidify their understanding of the underlying principles, and helping them appreciate the difference between analytical predictions and measurements of real systems. The project activities include a detailed educational study of how sophisticated internet-accessible virtual laboratories such as ONL can enhance the quality of advanced education, and the development of a series of technical enhancements to ONL that will make it more useful as an educational tool. The educational research component will involve faculty at two universities, who are using ONL to teach courses in networking to advanced undergraduates and graduate students, and who will work together with researchers specializing in learning and in evaluation of educational methods. The planned technical enhancements include tools to facilitate instructor observation and interaction with students engaged in laboratory exercises, enable collaboration and information-sharing among students, recording and playback of laboratory sessions to enable asynchronous review and automated analysis, and tools to enable students to contribute to an on-line knowledge base accessible to other students. The intellectual merit of the activity lies in its expected contributions to improved understanding of how laboratory experiences affect student learning and on how specific technical features of internet-accessible virtual laboratories such as ONL, contribute to the overall learning experience. The broader impact of the project lies in its potential use as a nation-wide education resource for educating network engineers.