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

该项目的目的是开发技术，通过使用可上网的虚拟实验室设施来改善高等技术教育中的实验室体验。实验室体验是高级技术教育的核心组成部分，它让学生看到他们在课堂上学到的东西如何应用到实践中，使他们能够体会到看似非常抽象的概念对现实世界的影响。虽然大学教师认为实验室的重要性是理所当然的，但实验室体验的质量却千差万别。造成这种情况的原因包括对学生如何从实验作业中学习以及如何最有效地实现教育目标的各种经验的理解有限，实验作业对教师和学生的时间要求以及实验室设备的高成本，这使得难以维持足够的设备来进行高级课程。该项目旨在利用一个名为开放网络实验室（ONL）的现有设施，在网络高级技术课程的背景下解决这些问题。ONL已被证明是一种有价值的教育工具，可以让学生在高级网络和信息技术课程中获得大量的实验室经验，从而建立和加强他们的课堂教学。ONL是围绕一组可扩展的千兆路由器构建的，允许远程用户执行广泛的实验和演示，允许他们直接观察各种参数对系统行为的影响。这允许他们将观察到的行为与通过分析方法或模拟预测的行为进行比较，帮助他们巩固对潜在原理的理解，并帮助他们欣赏分析预测和实际系统测量之间的差异。该项目的活动包括一项详细的教育研究，探讨像网络图书馆这样先进的可上网虚拟实验室如何能提高高等教育的质量，以及为网络图书馆开发一系列技术改进，使其成为更有用的教育工具。教育研究部分将涉及两所大学的教师，他们正在使用ONL向高级本科生和研究生教授网络课程，并将与专门研究学习和评估教育方法的研究人员一起工作。计划中的技术改进包括便于教师观察和与参与实验练习的学生互动的工具，使学生之间能够协作和信息共享，记录和回放实验过程以实现异步复习和自动分析，以及使学生能够为其他学生访问的在线知识库做出贡献的工具。该活动的智力价值在于其预期的贡献，有助于提高对实验室体验如何影响学生学习的理解，以及对互联网可访问虚拟实验室（如ONL）的具体技术特征如何有助于整体学习体验的理解。该项目更广泛的影响在于其作为教育网络工程师的全国性教育资源的潜在用途。

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.