Conceptualizing Student Engagement in Virtual Hands-on Lab

Abstract

Engaged students are more likely to spend longer time on study, and obtain a better academic performance. Previous studies investigated the role of student engagement in virtual learning environments (e.g., online course, online discussion forum, and intelligent tutoring systems). However, it is still challenging to engage students on a virtual hands-on lab system. Comparing to other virtual learning environment, students have a unique learning model -- learning by doing in virtual hands-on lab. To successfully engage students in a large hands-on lab in cybersecurity education, instructors need to understand how students engage in a lab session, and how their engagement affect lab learning outcome in this specific educational setting. In this paper, we developed a conceptual model, especially for virtual hands-on lab education, to describe student engagement during learning processes in working on virtual hands-on lab tasks. This model adopts two existing educational models on engagement behavior. Preliminary data was collected from 109 students' lab project in a computer network security course at Arizona State University in 2016 Fall semester. Pearson correlation coefficient analysis results reveal two statistically significant preliminary results: the longer time a student spends on reading lab instructional material, the more likely the student works longer time on lab tasks (p