Virtual Computer Labs

Introduction:

Generally students use computers extensively both within and outside of the classroom to do lab work, complete assignments, and interact with instructors and other students. Educational institutions provide computing laboratories for student use—typically distributed across campus locations, containing dozens to hundreds of computers, and providing both general- and special purpose software applications.

Definition and Description:

Virtual labs combine technology resources, reusable software environments, and automation, along with tried and true Training concepts, to enable hands-on training that can be delivered to anyone, anywhere, anytime.The Virtual Computing Lab (VCL) is a system that enables faculty, students, and staff to remotely access specialized software on any compute Virtual computer labs works based on a application that provides an environment that is installed on software which imitates dedicated hardware. The end user has the same experience on a virtual machine as they would have on dedicated hardware.

History:

Advances in networking, operating systems, and virtual computer technology now make it possible to implement labs that lack the physical “presence” associated with traditional campus computing labs. Such labs are sometimes called remote labs (Ma & Nickerson, 2006), web labs (Ross, Boroni, Goosey, Grinder, & Wissenbach, 1997), distributed learning labs (Winer, Chomienne, & Vazquez-Abad, 2000), or virtual labs (Ko et al., 2000). We use the term virtual lab (VLAB) for this presentation report. The Virtual Computing Laboratory (VCL) began in the spring of 2004 with a simple idea of providing dedicated remote access to a range of computing environments for students and researchers to access from any networked location either on or off campus. Like traditional physical computing labs, virtual labs have their own strengths and weaknesses, costs and benefits, capabilities, and limitations.

Advantages and benefits:

• Remote Learners
• Lab sessions before, during, or after classes
• Can offer one-on-one assistance during labs
• Gives learners ability to try software programs first-hand
• Gives access to a different desktop
• More effective training in less time
• Learner gets hands-on experience
• Multiple applications can exist simultaneously on the same computer, isolated from each other.
•  Virtual machine can offer an instruction set architecture that differs from real computers.
•  Easy maintenance, application provisioning, availability and convenient recovery.
•  Internet accessibility from anywhere in the world. 
• Stabilized platform that ensures software, application, operating system and browser compatibility

How It Works:

There are various ways of organizing and implementing Virtual computer Labs including:

• Remote access to multiple single-user computer systems
• Remote access to one or more multi-user computer systems
• Remote access to multiple virtual machines hosted within one or more physical servers.

Every user physically interacts with a laptop computer which in turn hosts a software-based interface to access one of a group of VLAB workstations via the Internet. The software interface can be implemented via telnet, HTTP, Microsoft Remote Desktop services, and other methods. Users may be physically located in classrooms, libraries, common areas, home, and work anywhere with sufficient network services and capacity.

Available Tools for Virtual computer labs:

• Moodle
• Adobe connect
• Webinar
• WebEx
• AccuConference
• Assem’live
• AT&T Connect
• Big Blue Button
• Big Marker
• BrainCert

Here we can observe in the video how virtual Visualization works 

Reference:

https://vcl.apache.org/

https://wiki.thayer.dartmouth.edu/display/computing/Virtual+Computer+Lab