A Platform for Interactive Software Experiments in Massive Open Online Courses

摘要: Massive open online courses enjoy a surge of popularity: Numerous platforms such as Coursera, Udacity, edX and many more offer variety high-quality to learners worldwide. Hasso Plattner Institute is operating its own platform openHPI where selected are available. These well-suited for the presentation video reading material opportunities interaction in web forums. Assignments, however, usually limited simple quizzes or basic question & answer tasks, although, very important component teaching practical assignments that allow students gather hands-on experiences. With InstantLab, we have created self-service interactive software experiments used our curriculum: Experiments provided VM images which executed on in-house private cloud accessed over remote-desktop connection embedded browser – requiring no additional users computers. In this paper, discuss how can be added state-of-the-art MOOCs using example InstantLab. We propose XCloud hybrid architecture takes into consideration unique challenges MOOC scenarios scaling issues resource management anonymous users. It provides following benefits infrastructures: hosting with support dynamic scale out public resources peak load situations; live single machines networks machines; access set special hardware (e.g. GPUs, accelerators); trust-based control scheme achieve self-managing assignment. report experiences InstantLab outline transition architecture. This effort bridges two fields computer science education research: Collected data experience from improve quality distance learning didactic methods.