The use of practical laboratories is a key in engineering education in order to provide our students with the resources needed to acquire practical skills. This is specially true in the case of distance education, where no physical interactions between lecturers and students take place, so virtual or remote laboratories must be used. UNED has developed a system to create and manage virtual remote laboratories, aimed at improving the way how practical exercises are conducted. This system is based on cloud computing and virtualization concepts. These Virtual Remote Laboratories (VRLabs) combine features of traditional virtual and remote laboratories but with clear differences over them, among others, VRLabs do not necessarily access real physical devices but are not based on simulations either. Each student is provided with a virtual remote laboratory based on virtualization that he/she will access through the Internet and will use to implement his/her practical assignments. We present details on how these laboratories are implemented for a subject in a post-degree program in our University. Furthermore, we also present an evaluation of the system used on such subject aiming at assessing the quality of the system regarding three different concepts, namely perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and perceived interaction. This evaluation is twofold, first, we have conducted a survey over the students of the subject, and second, we have performed another survey over the teaching team of the subject, both have been performed for the 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 academic years.
Presently, the ever-increasing use of new technologies helps people to acquire additional skills for developing an applied critical thinking in many contexts of our society. When it comes to education, and more particularly in any Engineering subject, practical learning scenarios are key to achieve a set of competencies and applied skills. In our particular case, the cybersecurity topic with a distance education methodology is considered and a new remote virtual laboratory based on containers will be presented and evaluated in this work. The laboratory is based on the Linux Docker virtualization technology, which allows us to create consistent realistic scenarios with lower configuration requirements for the students. The laboratory is comparatively evaluated with our previous environment, LoT@UNED, from both the points of view of the students’ acceptance with a set of UTAUT models, and their behavior regarding evaluation items, time distribution, and content resources. All data was obtained from students’ surveys and platform registers. The main conclusion of this work is that the proposed laboratory obtains a very high acceptance from the students, in terms of several different indicators (perceived usefulness, estimated effort, social influence, attitude, ease of access, and intention of use). Neither the use of the virtual platform nor the distance methodology employed affect the intention to use the technology proposed in this work.
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