Abstract
Presently, the ever-increasing use of new technologies helps people to acquire additional skills for developing an applied critical thinking in many contexts of our society. When it comes to education, and more particularly in any Engineering subject, practical learning scenarios are key to achieve a set of competencies and applied skills. In our particular case, the cybersecurity topic with a distance education methodology is considered and a new remote virtual laboratory based on containers will be presented and evaluated in this work. The laboratory is based on the Linux Docker virtualization technology, which allows us to create consistent realistic scenarios with lower configuration requirements for the students. The laboratory is comparatively evaluated with our previous environment, LoT@UNED, from both the points of view of the students’ acceptance with a set of UTAUT models, and their behavior regarding evaluation items, time distribution, and content resources. All data was obtained from students’ surveys and platform registers. The main conclusion of this work is that the proposed laboratory obtains a very high acceptance from the students, in terms of several different indicators (perceived usefulness, estimated effort, social influence, attitude, ease of access, and intention of use). Neither the use of the virtual platform nor the distance methodology employed affect the intention to use the technology proposed in this work.
Highlights
The emergence of new technologies with different capabilities to access and employ Internet resources as services is becoming of great interest these days [1]
Results for the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) model with container-based virtual laboratory (CVL) are very similar for hypotheses H1, H2, and H3, i.e., the perceived usefulness of the CVL technology influences the students’ attitude in a strong way (H1 = 0.67) and, as a consequence, the intention of use this technology is affected (H3 = 0.71)
A main difference with respect to the LoT@University for Distance Education (UNED) approach is that the ease of access does have a much stronger influence (H5 = 0.38) over the intention of using the CVL technology in other subjects
Summary
The emergence of new technologies with different capabilities to access and employ Internet resources as services is becoming of great interest these days [1]. The learning process of these relevant technologies is especially interesting within the context of a distance education methodology, such as the one employed in the National University for Distance Education (UNED) in Spain. The study of renewable energies such as wind and solar appears to be a field in which the use of low-cost remote laboratories is handy [15]. In these studies, the concept of Laboratory as a Service (LaaS), representing resources as sets of services, is studied. Each component is used as a web service, which can be hardware or software
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