forms. The same building blocks of individual labs
could be assembled to deliver both VMs / boxes,
or Cloud instances. The former would suit best the
MOOC distant/disconnected learners, and the latter,
some on-site labs and classes, or cases when a learner
doesn’t own a powerful enough device to run virtual-
ized systems.
7 CONCLUSIONS
The next generation of remote learning technologies
must address the issue of providing open, scaleable
and sustainable educational resources that support
these types of learning. The current generation of re-
mote teaching can be adapted to these types of learn-
ing in cases where the students are not required to
work with a specific concrete machine or within a spe-
cific environment. However, in many cases — partic-
ularly in the science and engineering disciplines —
this is not possible. virtualization holds the key to
solving this problem.
The Vagrant prototype architecture that we report
on in this paper has demonstrated the feasibility of
VM-based MOOLs (massive open online laborato-
ries). Even if we achieved a good conformance to
the requirements for such a laboratory, more research
needs to be done, particularly on the real-time feed-
back provided to students, who may be working off-
line; and on the collection and exploitation of the huge
amounts of data that could be collected on the stu-
dents’ machines.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A big thanks go to our intern Stéphane Germain,
who joined us during the summer 2014 to work on
this virtualized environment. This experiment was
conducted with financial support from Idex Paris-
Saclay (as part of the « Former avec le numérique
dans l’Université Paris-Saclay 2014 » programme).
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