A remote laboratory to leverage motivation of learners to practice: An exploratory study about system administration

This paper introduces a framework dedicated to online practical activities. Our remote laboratory is based on a distributed architecture composed of three layers: the learning interface is dedicated to end-users; the laboratory layer hosts the resources on which learners, teachers and tutors perform remote actions; the middleware layer acts as a broker between the two previous layers and embeds various control and learning services. The originality of our framework stands on: (1) a standard to control and supervise the resources of the remote laboratory, (2) the tracking of all users´ activities at a low level of granularity (including both actions performed on the remote resources, as well as those resulting from the invocation of the learning services) so that various pedagogical features can be further designed, and (3) its independence regarding the learning domain to be learned. An implementation of the framework based on open source software and dedicated to computer engineering is exposed, allowing for an exploratory study involving 139 students enrolled in the first year of a computer science degree. The results of this study are discussed, and suggest a positive effect of our framework on motivation of learners when they come to learn system administration.