Using Virtualization and Automatic Evaluation: Adapting Network Services Management Courses to the EHEA

This paper outlines the adaptation of a course on the management of network services in operating systems, called NetServicesOS, to the context of the new European Higher Education Area (EHEA). NetServicesOS is a mandatory course in one of the official graduate programs in the Faculty of Computer Science at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), Madrid, Spain, the Spanish University for Distance Education. Since UNED is a distance university, this course is taught entirely online. The adaptation process includes the implementation of continuous assessment, a key feature in EHEA´s methodology. This learning-teaching methodology is driven by a set of student activities that implement the continuous assessment. For this, a virtual machine-based framework was defined, and an automatic evaluation system implemented. The evaluation system can handle the large student numbers characteristic of distance learning. If the set of proposed activities had to be performed in person on site, significant resources would have been necessary since many computer laboratories would have been required to accommodate all the students. Furthermore, the proposed framework ensures that students can perform the practical work simply and flexibly, without the need for large computing platforms.