Topics in Educational Cyber-Physical Labs

Recent advances in remote sensing and actuation technologies, coupled with the large reach of the internet, allowed for the emergence of applications such as cyber-physical labs. Cyber-physical labs are the digital and remotely-accessible equivalent of the lab equipment students use in school to experiment, through web-based interfaces such as web applications. Students, teachers and lab owners derive value from these systems, they are our stakeholders. Students are the intended users, teachers are the educational content curators and lab owners are the service providers. In this thesis, we take a close look at issues pertaining to cyber-physical labs and propose new approaches to address them. We also analyze the use of such systems in a MOOC, to detect the impact of the exherted experimental behavior of students on their academic performance. First, we tackle the case of the generation of web apps interfacing cyber-physical labs. It is the equivalent of preparing experiments for teachers by arranging the equipment for multiple experiments with the same equipment. We propose an extension to the Smart Device Specification for cyber-phyiscal labs, and a tool which generates these apps based on it. The automatically generated apps implement the necessary functions to use a cyber-physical lab, and are ready to be integrated in online learning platfroms. Next, we investigate issues related to the collection and retrieval of students' generated data through their interaction with cyber-physical labs. We consider the needs of students and lab owners. Through questionnaires sent to both parties, we elicit the requirements for an activity-tracking infrastructure composed of a vocabulary and an architectural model. The proposed vocabulary ensures deriving value from the recorded activity, and the proposed architecture addresses privacy and data access issues pertaining to students and lab owners respectively. We evaluate our proposal with two example cyber-physical labs. Last, we collect the interaction data with a cyber-physical lab used in a MOOC. We devise computational analyses on the students activity statistics, in search for indicators of academic performance. We find that high and low performing students show statistically different activity statistics. Then, we sequence the steps students did in an experiment, and don't find any statistically significant patterns for low and high-performing students. This analysis provides insights on the usage of installed facilities to service a potential massive access to limited resources (lab installations), and shed light on possible indicators for academic performance.