Integrating Virtual Machine based Education with Online Learning Systems

Online learning and virtualization are two key and complementary technologies which are increasingly used for today’s education missions. Online learning offers great accessibility to a variety of educational materials and activities, whereas virtualization allows a variety of educational software to be easily distributed using virtual machines (VMs). However, in current practice, the use of VM-based education is largely disconnected from online learning. In fact, widely used online learning systems do not allow users to directly use VMs online, and the use of VMs often has to rely on physical laboratories which provide only limited resources to host the VMs and limited hours to access the VMs. This gap between online learning and VM-based education presents a serious hurdle to further adoption of these technologies. This paper presents a new approach to addressing this gap by integrating VM-based education with online learning. The result of this approach is CloudVLE, a new education system that seamlessly embeds the management and use of VMs in a widely used online learning system. CloudVLE is among the first to enable instructors and students to flexibly and conveniently create and consume VM-based course materials in the same online environment that they are already familiar with and use for conventional course materials. Moreover, CloudVLE is also unique in its use of several emerging computing technologies for enhancing online VM-based education. It supports the use of cloud computing resources to provide scalable and costeffective hosting of the educational VMs. It provides a mobile app to present an interface tailored for mobile devices, which further improves the accessibility and usability of the VMs. It integrates social networks with the traditional online forums used by online learning systems to enhance the interactions between instructors and students. Finally, this paper discusses the experiences from the use of CloudVLE for teaching an undergraduate operating systems course, and presents the highly positive feedback from the students taking this class.