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，改善高级技术教育中的实验室经验。实验室体验是高级技术教育的核心组成部分，让学生看到他们在课堂上学到的东西如何付诸实践，使他们能够领会似乎非常抽象的概念在现实世界中的含义。尽管大学教职员工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。原因包括对学生如何从实验作业中学习以及实现教育目标最有效的经验的了解有限，实验作业对教职员工和学生的时间要求都很高，以及实验室设施的高昂成本，这使得维护足够的高级课程设施变得困难。该项目寻求在网络高级技术课程的背景下，使用一个称为开放式网络实验室(ONL)的现有设施来解决这些问题。事实证明，ONL是一种宝贵的教育工具，可以让高级网络和信息技术课程的学生在课堂教学的基础上获得丰富的实验室体验。ONL围绕一组可扩展的千兆路由器构建，允许远程用户进行广泛的实验和演示，使他们能够直接观察各种参数对系统行为的影响。这使他们能够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，帮助他们巩固对基本原理的理解，并帮助他们认识到真实系统的分析预测和测量之间的差异。项目活动包括详细的教育研究，了解ONL等可上网的复杂虚拟实验室如何提高高等教育质量，以及开发一系列增强ONL的技术，使其作为一种教育工具更加有用。教育研究部分将涉及两所大学的教职员工，他们使用ONL向高级本科生和研究生教授网络课程，并将与专门从事学习和教育方法评估的研究人员合作。计划中的技术改进包括便利教师观察和与参与实验室练习的学生互动的工具、促进学生之间的协作和信息共享的工具、记录和回放实验室课程以实现非同步审查和自动分析的工具，以及使学生能够为其他学生可访问的在线知识库作出贡献的工具。这项活动的智力价值在于它预期有助于增进对实验室体验如何影响学生学习的理解，以及关于ONL等可上网虚拟实验室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它可能被用作培养网络工程师的全国性教育资源。

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.