The constrains of traditional hands‐on sessions have expedited R&D in remote laboratories over the past decade, offering higher education an effective way to overcome the high cost of equipment, the limited flexibility of time, or the physical distance to labs, among other shortcomings. Considering these issues, the authors of this work have developed the remote access and management of a classical laboratory—called Ciscolab—dedicated to computer networking practices in Computer Science. The improvements developed have been focused on automatically managing the web‐learning resources for educational purposes, while providing a high level of security to be accessed by trusted students. To this end, this paper describes how an institution's Identity Provider (IdP) was integrated into a Meeting Room Booking System (MRBS) to attain a secure access to the remote equipment and how a maintenance system was automated to perform scheduled backups and reboots of the networking systems. As a main contribution, we developed an analysis methodology to track the students’ work to detect their strengths and weaknesses. In addition, we provide a statistical study after the interaction of a group of students on how the remote lab influenced three different educational areas: learning and motivation (LM), usability and practicality (UP), as well as outcome and feasibility (OF).
In the last years, many solutions have been developed based on the Internet of Things (IoT) applied to several fields such as agriculture, road safety or electric lighting, among others. These devices are usually located in places that are not easy to access, which makes their software difficult to update. These updates should be carried out to improve the software of the devices to include new functionalities and/or solve security problems. This paper presents an Over-the-Air (OTA) programming system for devices that do not natively integrate a wireless update service. A description of the hardware used is included, as well as the update management application developed to carry out this task. The approach proposed has been validated by updating a microcontroller-based system applied to the area of road safety. The validation consisted in measuring the additional consumption required by the auxiliary update system compared to the base consumption, as well as determining the time required to update an IoT node in both wireless and wired mode. The results obtained show a reduction in consumption of 577% and a reduction in the updating time of 66%.
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