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

该项目的目的是开发技术，通过使用互联网访问，虚拟实验室设施，改善高级技术教育的实验室经验。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习的内容如何付诸实践，使他们能够欣赏看似非常抽象的概念的现实世界的影响。虽然实验室的重要性是理所当然的大学教师，实验室经验的质量是高度可变的。其原因包括对学生如何从实验室作业中学习的理解有限，以及在实现教育目标方面最有效的经验种类，实验室作业对教师和学生的时间要求以及实验室设施的高成本，这使得很难为高级课程保持足够的设施。该项目力求利用一个称为开放网络实验室的现有设施，在网络高级技术课程的范围内解决这些问题。ONL已被证明是一个有价值的教育工具，使学生在先进的网络和信息技术课程有一个实质性的实验室经验，建立在和加强他们的课堂教学。ONL围绕一组可扩展的千兆路由器构建，允许远程用户执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，并帮助他们了解分析预测与真实的系统测量之间的差异。项目活动包括详细的教育研究，研究诸如ONL等先进的可通过互联网访问的虚拟实验室如何提高高等教育的质量，以及开发一系列ONL的技术改进，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师，他们正在使用ONL向高年级本科生和研究生教授网络课程，他们将与专门从事学习和评价教育方法的研究人员合作。计划中的技术改进包括：提供工具，便利教员观察和与参与实验练习的学生互动，使学生之间能够协作和分享信息，记录和回放实验课，以便能够进行异步审查和自动分析;提供工具，使学生能够为其他学生可以访问的在线知识库作出贡献。该活动的智力价值在于其预期的贡献，以提高对实验室经验如何影响学生的学习，以及如何在互联网上访问的虚拟实验室，如ONL的具体技术特点，有助于整体的学习经验的理解。 该项目更广泛的影响在于其潜在的用途，作为一个全国性的教育资源，教育网络工程师。

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.