Lab4CE: a Remote Laboratory for Computer Education
- PDF / 1,867,846 Bytes
- 27 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 51 Downloads / 186 Views
Lab4CE: a Remote Laboratory for Computer Education Julien Broisin 1 & Rémi Venant 1 & Philippe Vidal 1
# International Artificial Intelligence in Education Society 2015
Abstract Remote practical activities have been demonstrated to be efficient when learners come to acquire inquiry skills. In computer science education, virtualization technologies are gaining popularity as this technological advance enables instructors to implement realistic practical learning activities, and learners to engage in authentic and problem-based learning. However, virtualization solutions have not been designed especially for education and do not address any pedagogical concern. Since several large-scale studies showed that instructional supports during practical activities are almost as important as technical features, this article investigates the following research question: how the scaffolding around the lab increases students’ engagement in remote practical learning of computer science? To answer this question, we introduce the Lab4CE environment, a remote laboratory for computer education which adopts a distributed, modular and flexible architecture to integrate a set of scaffolding tools and services intended for instructors and learners. An exploratory study conducted with 139 undergraduate students enrolled in the first year of a computer science degree suggests a positive effect of the framework on learners’ engagement when they come to practice system administration, and reveals a significant positive correlation between students’ activity within the system and students’ learning achievement. Keywords Online learning environment . Remote laboratory . Computer science
Introduction Distribution at a large scale of online learning resources and activities has been in the focus of research in the past few years, but a lower attention has been given to activities * Julien Broisin [email protected] Rémi Venant [email protected] Philippe Vidal [email protected] 1
University of Toulouse III, 118 route de Narbonne, 31062 Toulouse, France
Int J Artif Intell Educ
that require practice into a laboratory. Practical activities, referred to as Bany learning and teaching activity that engages learners in manipulating and analyzing real and physical objects^ in this document, are efficient when learners come to acquire inquiry skills (de Jong et al. 2013). In STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields, inquiry-based learning is a pedagogical method relying on constructivist and socio-constructivist theories of learning, that allows students to learn about science by engaging them in investigation (Bell et al. 2010). In such contexts, learners build their own interpretations of scientific concepts and acquire knowledge about how to do science through realistic works. Compared to traditional practical activities, those mediated by a remote laboratory (lab) bring a number of advantages (Lowe et al. 2013): they can be used by a large pool of students spread across multiple institutions (i.e., learners of a
Data Loading...
