From Design to Operations of Online Lab-Works : Application of a Generic Approach to Computer Science Education
Bringing online practical learning activities is a research problem studied for over a decade due to educational and economic challenges it engenders. Indeed, it is a category of courses required for scientific, technological, engineering and mathematics disciplines to achieve specific learning objectives related to the acquisition of professional and scientific skills, but also teamwork and communication skills. Research in the field of remote lab-works helped to highlight pedagogical and technical problems hindering the development and acceptance of remote lab-works by the human actors, which our work attempt to provide answers. In particular, this thesis addresses issues related (1) to the learning theoretical foundations in the context of remote lab-works; (2) Advances both technical and pedagogical of the Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL), and (3) Technical and Technological advances in online distributed and shared laboratories devices. In other words, it is to achieve the pedagogical effectiveness of remote lab-works while integrating them in LMS (Learning Management Systems) used for the other types of learning activities. Our proposals center around two key elements: (1) A structured layered architecture ensuring seamless communication between learning context (LMS) and experimental context (online labs), and (2) A meta-model that, on one hand, describes formally the elements inherent to the lab-work activity (labs, experiments and devices) and the activities performed by users on these entities, and on the other hand, drives the control and supervision of laboratories and experiments. From a technical standpoint, our contributions concern the proposal of a meta-model standard for controlling and managing the lifecycle of experiments that facilitates uniform representation of heterogeneous laboratories' devices while promoting the deployment and the operating of distributed experiments across multiple sites, as well as the introduction of uniform interfaces for control and monitoring, hiding the specific details of remote laboratories to high-level applications such as LMSs. From an educational point of view, we introduce the learning object "Experiment" to encourage the practice, sharing and the reuse of remote lab-works in the online curriculum, and support the different educational functions such as collaborative learning and tutoring (synchronous and asynchronous) through a set of tailored GUIs whose development is made easy by the decomposition of the overall system into different layers. Our proposals have been tested in the context of remote lab-works on our field of education: The Computer Science. The various generic meta- models were specialized to describe and monitor the environment of experimentation and the experiments that take place within them, but also to model, store and use the traces of interactions between user and these experiments. Finally, specific components provide the link between abstract models and concrete low-level resources, whereas high-level HCI and tools support the different pedagogical functions: * The instructional design is extended to the design of online experiments through an intuitive GUI offered to teachers, allowing them to design and test experiments with an arbitrary level of complexity. * Online learning is supported by a realistic interface that ensures both performing operations on remote experiments; navigate efficiently among the components of an online experience, but also collaborative learning. * The online tutoring is supported by an interface that extends the learning HCI with extended privileges and additional tools enabling remote tutors detect deadlocks, to help struggling learners, and finally to evaluate the work of these learners.