2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Our Virtualization Technologies course is undergoing a major redesign to align with current trends in virtualization and cloud computing. The rapid evolution of virtualization technologies, marked by the rise of containerization and open-source hypervisors alongside the market consolidation of legacy leaders like VMware, necessitates a continuous overhaul of hands-on curricula in computing education. Courses built upon specific vendor-centric academies face obsolescence, requiring educators to develop new, agile lab environments. This project aims to modernize the course’s hands-on lab component by developing new virtual lab modules, integrating automatic assessment tools, and deploying the labs on a private cloud infrastructure.

This work-in-progress paper presents the redesign of the lab component for a senior-level Virtualization Technologies course to address the challenges of technological currency and pedagogical scalability. A key innovation in this redesign is the incorporation of immediate feedback mechanisms using Canvas’s New Quizzes feature. This aligns with findings from educational research demonstrating that immediate feedback in online learning environments significantly enhances student engagement, reduces anxiety, and improves learning outcomes. By allowing students to iteratively correct mistakes and resubmit lab work, the project supports a trial-and-error learning model that fosters deeper understanding and self-regulated learning.

The lab modules cover a range of topics including container deployment and management, hosted and bare-metal hypervisors, centralized management with Proxmox, live migration, high availability, orchestration, and public cloud integration. Each lab is being developed and tested in a local virtual environment, with detailed manuals and assessment instruments designed to support both automatic and manual grading. The use of advanced answer matching techniques such as Regular Expression Match and Levenshtein Distance in Canvas enables flexible grading and supports the delivery of immediate, formative feedback.

The next phase involves migrating the lab environment to the college’s private cloud system, followed by comprehensive testing. Full deployment is scheduled for Spring 2026, with student surveys and faculty peer reviews planned to evaluate the effectiveness of the new labs. The modular design and Canvas integration also facilitate reuse in related cloud computing courses.

This project demonstrates a scalable, evidence-based approach to curriculum modernization in technical education. By integrating current industry tools with pedagogical strategies supported by educational research, it aims to enhance both the quality and accessibility of virtualization technology education in an increasingly online learning environment.