2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This study is a follow-up to the lab redesign project reported at the ASEE Annual Conference in 2022. Information Technology is progressing fast, and knowledge students need to acquire are constantly changing. Our face-to-face and distance education student population is also growing. The feedback to students is often delayed due to large class sizes. To deal with these challenges, we have been incorporating virtual labs and automated assessments in our information technology laboratory courses for years. The labs and lab environments in our courses were updated several times accordingly. The latest major redesign in an intrusion detection course was performed in the 2021-2022 academic year. The new lab platform contains a single Linux virtual appliance, on which multiple nested KVM virtual machines act as attacker or defender. The virtual appliance can be deployed locally on a personal computer or remotely on a private cloud system. Students conduct labs using the nested virtual machines inside the lab environment and submit lab reports using “New Quizzes” on our Learning Management System (LMS) CANVAS for immediate feedback. They can fix problems and resubmit the labs before the due dates for better grades. The goal of the redesign project is to leverage usage of virtual labs with learning management systems to assess and improve student learning. The trial-and-error attempt is designed to help students master course topics better and foster problem-solving capabilities. Moreover, the automated assessment reduces turnaround time on grading for instructors, especially beneficial in large classes. Can such a project meet the goal? In this study, we continue to monitor students’ performance and feedback over the years using lab grades and anonymous surveys. The feedback from different groups of students (face-to-face and distance education) is also compared and analyzed.