Exploring strengths and weaknesses: A case study after developing a remote network lab

Abstract

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).