ENHANCING TECHNICAL TRAINING QUALITY

Complementing the e-Learning Solutions with Virtual Laboratories

Joanna Kosinska, Jacek Kosinski

Department of Computer Science, AGH – University of Science and Technology, Al. Mickiewicza 30, Krakow, Poland

Keywords: e-Learning , virtual laboratory, trainings, individualization, cost reduction.

Abstract: Nowadays, while the evolution of computer science technologies is amazing, the companies’ CEOs face the

challenge of keeping their employees competence on the highest level. In order to enjoy high prestige, the

managing directors have to craft an innovative corporate image. This is not possible with the lack of

suitably trained staff. E-learning offers modern ways of training employees, but to benefit from it, it has to

be properly deployed and ensure that learners gleaned good knowledge, fully understood the material and

what is most important gained proper practical skills. The virtual laboratories included in e-Learning

platforms fill the gap arose from the lack of practical exercises that are available in instructor-led trainings.

Moreover, the individuals have the ability to do exercise by oneself and develop their practical skills when

they want. This paper presents an original project of a virtual laboratory developed at the Department of

Computer Science AGH-UST. The virtual networking laboratory is an e-Learning platform extension,

aiding the process of computer network training.

1 INTRODUCTION

The proliferation of Internet technologies has

significantly changed the ways one is obtaining

knowledge. The traditional classroom-based training

is still an effective way of achieving new skills, but

often it is too expensive to participate in it. The

expensiveness means not only the charges/fees

(course, travel, hotel costs) but also the lost amount

of time related to reaching the course place. In most

cases the exponentially growing amount of

information gathered in the internet is sufficient to

gain an extensive knowledge in some areas. But this

kind of self-learning requires self-discipline and the

necessity to find appropriate materials. e-Learning

solutions offer different, often competitive

compared to traditional learning, opportunities for

broadening knowledge. Its one of the most

important goals - “Anytime, Anywhere, Anyplace”

is accomplished through the diverse available tools

as discussion boards, electronic chats, virtual

classrooms, demonstrations, supporting document

materials, multimedia all available from a single

place. e-Learning, applied to the right problem in the

right way, can deliver enormous efficiency and

effectiveness gains to an organization. Being able to

produce an accurate and defendable return on

investment has long been the Holy Grail of the

training industry (GEO Learning).

A well designed e-Learning material is

interactive and engages the learner. The included

documents, simulations and tests expand the

learners’ theoretical knowledge. However, the

multimedia demonstrations of the running system

began to be insufficient in the process of technical

training. For the company, a well trained employee

is not the one possessing the highest education, but

the one that is able to put the knowledge into

practice. Therefore the e-Learning techniques are

often supplemented with classroom-based practical

exercises (aka blended learning). The technical

training in most cases requires many hours work,

spent on testing lots of possible configurations. The

AGH-UST Department of Computer Science, with

the cooperation of Cisco Systems company delivers

Cisco Academy Trainings (http://cisco.netacad.net/).

These trainings are characterized by long course

cycles and the necessity to assure the access to the

modern hardware and software. The scenario of a

typical course is made up of a short introductory

lecture followed by many hours of practical

laboratories. To decrease the staff load and speed up

the course, keeping up at the same time the high

substantial level, the Virtual Networking Laboratory

300

Kosinska J. and Kosinski J. (2006).

ENHANCING TECHNICAL TRAINING QUALITY - Complementing the e-Learning Solutions with Virtual Laboratories.

In Proceedings of the International Conference on e-Business, pages 300-305

DOI: 10.5220/0001425203000305

 SciTePress

(VNetLab) training infrastructure has been

developed. This is an original project, disparate

from other similar solutions.

The Cisco Academy trainings are based on

multimedia educational materials (delivered by

Cisco company) in the form of HTML pages with

Macromedia Flash additions. Simultaneously the

Moodle (http://www.moodle.org) e-Learning

platform is used to enhance the quality of courses. In

order to engage the learner and increase its retention

and satisfaction, new forms of education have to be

embedded into e-Learning platforms. If online

learning is to seriously compete in the educational

marketplace, the challenge of offering robust and

highly interactive, asynchronous laboratory courses

which include learner interaction with the task by

inserting information, decision-making, and

executing steps, also the selection of equipment and

instrumentation, data collection and analysis and the

capability to make mistakes must be met (Meisner et

al. 2005). Those virtual laboratories (VLab) fill the

gap arose from the lack of practical exercises that

are available in instructor-led trainings. Moreover,

the learner has the ability to do the exercise by

oneself, and what is important a several times that is

not often possible during group trainings, where

usually one person is doing the task on the only one

set of equipment and the rest are just observers.

This paper presents the architecture of the Virtual

Networking Laboratory developed at the AGH-UST

Department of Computer Science. This laboratory is

developed as an extension of Moodle platform,

enabling the access to physical laboratories devices,

in order to allow learner’s training of the material

introduced during the lecture. Moreover, the training

is not tight to a single location, it can be done

remotely from any place. The laboratory is

integrated with the e-Learning platform and enabled

as one of its activity. Its concept is ready for the

adoption and implementation of e-Learning in the

business solution in order to enhance the quality and

performance, and also reduce costs of technical

training. The section 2 comes with the benefits of

incorporating virtual laboratories into trainings.

Next section lists the features a well organized

virtual laboratory should posses. The described

architecture and its implementation are based on

experiences from designing VNetLab, a robust

platform for providing arbitrary networking

trainings. The paper ends up with a summary

including a future works that should be done.

2 THE BENEFITS

Due to the higher and higher number of learners

accessing the courses, the cost of laboratories for

didactical applications is going to be very high. As a

consequence, a number of software tools and

environments must be developed to help users to

share laboratory resources and realize experiments

(Colace et al. 2004). A virtual laboratory can be

thought as an online access to real systems where

learners are able to practice in a controlled and safe

environment without the risk of destroying the

production components. Learners have the

opportunities to revisit tasks and consolidate the

material.

Many companies, both large and small are

migrating towards offering e-Learning courses to

their employees. The reason, simply put is that

through e-Learning, you can train more people and

spend the least amount of money (Seamless

Technology, 2006). The business benefits from

e-Learning in many aspects. The most convincing

argument is the tremendous cost savings comparing

to traditional trainings. The savings are not only in

terms of money, but also the reduced time away

from job. The just-in-time training opportunities and

24/7 availability cause that more and more

companies are investing in this form of training. If

the e-Learning course includes an environment

where the learner can also practice, the taken

decision is all the more justified. The further part of

this section describes the advantages of virtual

laboratories based on our experiences with

VNetLab.

At the beginning of VNetLab deployment into

Cisco Academy trainings, the hybrid model of

trainings was chosen. Hence, the theoretical

introduction was followed by two kinds of practical

exercises. The first category included virtual

exercises in VNetLab, where learners got used to the

set of new commands and there arguments. These

exercises consisted of short tasks that as a solution

included 2-3 new commands. The difficulty

consisted in the fact that the learner had to find by

himself the proper commands. Doing these exercises

guaranteed significant speed up of exercises in the

classroom. The instructor had only to instruct what

to do, and not how it should be done. From the

observations clearly followed that these preliminary

virtual exercises let to shorten about 20% of the

duration of classically led trainings. This gives the

possibility of introducing more material into the

training. The second category included virtual

ENHANCING TECHNICAL TRAINING QUALITY - Complementing the e-Learning Solutions with Virtual Laboratories

301

exercises realized after the classroom ones. The

purpose of these exercises was to solidify gained

knowledge. They consisted of laboratories

addressing more complex problems, different

variants of those done in the classroom. This part of

training enabled to effectively extend the time of

training to 30-50%, what linearly translates into

additional learner knowledge. Summing up, with the

support of virtual laboratory it was possible, without

decreasing the course quality, even with noticeably

higher knowledge retention rate, to reduce the

number of meetings to 60%.

Developing own laboratories is often very costly,

both in time and money, especially when the

intention is to prepare a several of workstations.

Taking into account the price of the equipment and

also the fact it is ageing very quickly, the investment

might occur unprofitable as the training

infrastructure really grows in costs. The virtual

laboratory approach enables to create lots of training

workstations, while fully exhausting only one set of

equipment. This is achieved through reservation and

time sharing techniques described in the following

section. The VNetLab infrastructure is a software

that enables realization of fully automatic access to

physical networking devices for further usage. This

software is able to virtualize any kind of networking

device, assuming this device is equipped with

console port, enabling the devices management.

Observation of learners undertaking a virtual

exercise may be a part of a formative assessment. It

is likely that within the e-Learning platform, final

assessment will involve applying the skills learnt in

the virtual laboratory to real life tasks (FlexibleL).

The learners engaged in performing tasks in a virtual

laboratory, develop their technology skills and can

safely test intriguing configurations, feel more

relaxed and comfortable in the VNetLab than in real

situations. Virtual experiments could potentially

allow learners to improve skills in deductive

reasoning, hypothesis formation and testing as

effectively as through real experiments (Dalgarno et

al. 2003). However, the work on remote devices is

quite different than the work in the physical

laboratories. The learner does not have the access to

the wirings, hence is not able to change devices

cross connections. The learner cannot rely on the

LED signalling connection status. The inability to

power cycle the devices might also present

problems. Sometimes it is necessary to reset the

device’s configuration, especially when some wrong

learner’s commands caused the loss of the ability to

execute commands.

3 DESIGNING A VIRTUAL

LABORATORY

The process of composing a virtual laboratory

requires to virtualize devices that are to be exposed.

Figure 1 presents a scheme of user interaction

undertaking an exercise in the VNetLab. Firstly, the

learner has to authenticate in the e-Learning

platform. If this process succeeds, the page with

exercise description and Java applets is being

Access Router

Database

Server

Web

Server

Access Server

Internet

Lab Router 2

Lab Router 1

Lab Router 3

Lab Switch 1

moodle

platform

students’

devices

Local Area Network

VNetLab’s

equipment

configure laboratory

Figure 1: Scheme of communication in VNetLab.

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displayed. The started applets initiate the connection

with Access Server device. This connection is used

for managing the devices included in the VNetLab

topology.

The proposed solution is an internet based

application using a notion of a thin client

architecture that requires possessing only a web

browser with Java VM on board. The Java Applet

technology provides access to exposed equipment

via Telnet or SSH protocol from a single Web

browser window.

In most of this kind of systems, the main stress is

put just on the possibility to remotely expose the

existing infrastructure. The instructor has only the

possibility to enable devices where learners could

practice and check previously acquired theoretical

knowledge. The instructor however was unable to

check what the learner is actually doing on enabled

devices, hence there was no possibility to verify and

include in the assessment the degree of the acquired

practical knowledge. The VNetLab system

overcomes these inconveniences. It assumes the

strict definition of the tasks that the learner has to do

during the course. Additionally, the form of the

answers is strictly defined simplifying the further

assessment. The course appraisal, both automatic

and subjective made by the instructor can be one of

the factors taken into account and affecting the final

score achieved at the end of the course.

The architecture of the VNetLab carried out at

the AGH-UST arose from the made assumptions to

mostly imitate its operation to traditionally led

trainings. The virtually led training should not

generally differ from the classroom-based training.

The only noticeably difference should be the

remoteness, being more precise the distance between

the instructor, learner and the equipment. The

presented approach distinguishes following steps

while carrying out exercise in virtual laboratory:

1. Slot reservation – reserving the time period

when the equipment in laboratory is free

and can be utilized by the requesting

learner. The learner specifies the beginning

and the end time during which the task will

be performed. Depending on the set

configuration of the exercise, the learner

might decide how many slots will be

reserved, the length of the slot, etc.

2. Preparation of the infrastructure - includes

preparation of devices, both that would be

configured by learner and that are

responsible for defining connections. This

phase includes loading devices’ (that are

going to be configured) initial

configurations. The whole task is done

without learner’s knowledge, just before

the learner begins to do the exercise.

3. Carrying out the exercise - gaining access

to the virtual laboratory. Learner gets the

detailed description of the task and a set of

applets enabling to configure particular

devices. After submitting the work (or after

the timeout) the system retrieves the

configurations from devices and stores it in

a database for further assessment.

4. Removing unnecessary work results - this

step restores the devices to their initial

state, more precisely removes the

configuration the learner has done and

restarts the device. This step is often a time

consuming task and has to be done much

earlier before a learner attempt.

5. Assessment of the learner’s results - the

overall learner’s work is being evaluated.

Figure 2: Web access to the VNetLab devices.

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The saved solutions are retrieved from the

database and presented to the instructor.

The system also possesses a base

configuration that is a listing of ideally

solved task. The instructor receives both

listings with highlighted differences. This

simplifies finding the potential mistakes

especially in long configuration files. The

comparison is generated as a HTML file

from the result of operating system

command ‘diff’. Formatting it into HTML,

including different background colours that

depicts differing fragments, improves the

readability and speeds up the assessment

phase. The learner receives a score, a

feedback from the instructor and the listing

of the model solution. The built-in linking

mechanism that automatically searches for

strings in text and links them to glossary

terms, replaces all commands appearing in

the listing with the links to glossary terms

(includes its definition, usage example,

meaning of particular options). This

capability significantly shortens the time

learners spent on tracing and understanding

the idea of the solution.

All these phases are mapped to implemented

modules that accomplish virtual laboratory

functionality. The following layers (as depicted on

Figure 3) can be distinguished within the VNetLab:

1. Virtualized devices layer - This layer is

comprised of physical devices and the

interfaces that enable access to those

devices and their management. The

implementation of this layer is dependent

of the possessed equipment and the e-

Learning platform technology.

2. The database layer – Gathers all data that

are related to devices configuration and its

current state. Also learners training results

are stored there.

3. The e-Learning platform layer – This layer

is responsible for handling authentication

and authorization mechanisms. It also has

to posses such features as grade book, chat,

and glossary. VNetLab uses this module as

a learner’s interface.

4. Logging event layer – Is responsible for

tracking all events in the VNetLab and

storing them in the database. Additionally it

has the ability to inform via email the

administrator about all critical events from

the infrastructure perspective.

5. Scheduling layer – Checks the availability

of all devices. Defines and manages the

time period within which learners can

undertake trainings. Assigns access

permissions to devices and checks the

exclusiveness of access.

6. Instructor’s layer – The level that enables

the management of the physical topology of

VNetLab, creation of configurations and

exercise content. It gives the ability to

monitor system’s events.

During the exercise the learner modifies device’s

parameters, changes its values to meet the

requirements set in the task’s content. All this work

is saved in router or switch configuration and

exported on demand into a text file. The content of

this file makes up a list of commands that need to be

executed in order to obtain the given configuration.

The VNetLab has a modular and extensible

architecture. Its implementation technology is

restricted by the Moodle e-Learning platform

technology it is embedded into. Networking

trainings that are carried at AGH-UST are provided

through Moodle platform, hence the necessity of

integrating the VNetLab system with this platform.

The next reason of choosing Moodle platform was

the ability of utilizing built-in advanced tools as

grade book, calendar, chat, glossary without which

the VNetLab’s functionality would become sparse

and implementing them from scratch would be very

costly. The Moodle platform is very flexible for

further extensions and adding other modules to it is

straightforward. The developer has a template with

defined functions that has to be filled with proper

code. These functions are called by the portal and

serve as an interaction layer between the portal and

the new module.

Recently, there exist many implementations of

virtual laboratories. It is important to distinguish the

simulations from experiments on real devices.

VNetLab falls to the latter category. To analyze the

proposed solution with the existing ones it is good to

choose one from the same line. The Network

Development Group (NDG) offers a similar product

named NetLab. NetLab is offered in two versions:

E-Learning platform

database

virtualized devices

Logging events module

Schedulling module

Instructor’s module

Figure 3: Architecture of VNetLab.

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Academy Edition – adjusted to Cisco CNAP

trainings (CNAP). The main differences between

VNetLab and NetLab are:

• lack of possibility of cycling the power on

device (VNetLab),

• lack of versioning capabilities (VNetLab),

• lack of logging students’ commands

(VNetLab),

• lack of assessment phase (NetLab),

• the system only works with certain

topologies, it is not possible to define new

one (NetLab),

• it is difficult to integrate it with e-Learning

platform (NetLab),

• to expensive license and necessity to buy

dedicated hardware (NetLab).

The integration with e-Learning platform is one

of the most important feature that distinguishes the

proposed solution from the other. If e-Learning is to

be successful in bringing technical training courses,

it has to provide comprehensive solutions. The

VNetLab is trying to fulfill this requirement, but still

needs some improvements, as described in the

following section.

4 SUMMARY

This paper has discussed the potential of virtual

laboratories included in the program of technical

trainings. The elaboration was done based on

experiences from implementing Virtual Networking

Laboratory at the AGH-UST. The gained

experiences show that VLab environments are

essential parts of training provisioning and increases

learners retention and satisfaction. The learners

engaged in performing tasks in a virtual laboratory

develop their technology skills making them more

valuable employees.

As shown, virtual laboratories must be embedded

into e-Learning platforms to enhance the quality of

education. The described architecture of VNetLab

system is so general that with ease can be mapped to

any kind of virtual laboratory, leaving for

developers the implementation of core functionality

of the specific area. Embedding the laboratory into

other e-Learning platform should not impose

difficulty as most of them have already defined

modules that were used with the VNetLab system.

There are many improvements worth

implementing that should be taken into

consideration. The major one is the ability to allow

more than one learner to undertake the exercise at

the same moment. This would be achieved through

creation of twin set of devices. Another feature

includes module that automatically verifies

correctness of learner’s work without the

supervision of the instructor. The module would

include semantic aspects and explore reasoning and

inference solutions. Hence, the necessity of

introducing an ontology layer into the system.

Finally, it is worth to emphasize that this kind of

innovative training is beneficial especially for those

learners that are disciplined, motivated to learn, has

a need for learning and self-directed, so for the one

that the business seeks.

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