The role of virtualization in computing education

Over the past years, many problems related to the system administration of laboratories for undergraduate system-oriented courses have found elegant solutions in the deployment of virtualization suites. This technological advance enabled these courses to switch from a mostly descriptive content to learning activities which engage students in hands-on, authentic, problem-based learning. Since this type of activity requires students to be administrators of their own virtual machines (VM) or even virtual networks, the experience gained is intrinsically authentic. The potential impact on student learning, as compared to simulation or lecture only based setups is worth investigating for laboratories in operating systems, networking, computer security, system administration, etc. We propose to review the increasingly important role that virtualization is playing in computing education from 2 perspectives; (1) Classrooms' system administration and technological advances which support the development of new pedagogies (2) Pedagogical advances which instructors can now implement thanks to these technologies and their impact on students learning from either quantitative or qualitative perspectives The presenters will share their experience leading the Xen Worlds, V-NetLab and SOFTICE projects.