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Posted by afoote in : Information Systems, Uncategorized , trackback
The Information Systems department is analyzing virtualization for course delivery. One of the major issues in teaching Information Systems (IS) courses is the setup of the physical computers that the course is being taught with. In the ideal world the IS program would only teach a limited number of courses all using the same Operating Systems, Database Management Systems, Web Environments and networking environments. Unfortunately this does not happen at Stevenson University. We teach courses using Windows XP, MS Access, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Microsoft Visual Studio as the primary operating environment. In our efforts to prepare students for employment in the computer industry, courses need to be taught that do not use the primary operating environment. We do teach courses in Unix and other networking configurations. We do teach courses that use Oracle, IBM DB2 and MySQL as the Database Management System. The overhead of time and money that is involved with setting up computer labs for the different environments is a challenge. For the students there is the challenge of an assignment that needs to be completed in an unusual operating environment. Where does the student find a computer that will have the needed software and network available to complete the assignment?
The process we are looking at is to have the computer environment needed for the course to be residing on a server on the school network. As a student needs a particular computer configuration, the student will select the environment from a menu and the operating system, database management system and web configuration will be setup for the student to perform their course work. The environment resides on the server and is not using the operating system and network of the computer the student is using. This is similar to the computer terminals of the mainframe environment of twenty years ago. The student will use the computer configuration delivered from the server for the work that is needed and close the system when the session is over. The next student will be able to select the computer configuration that is needed without making any changes to the computer that is being used.
Over the years we have tried a number of strategies to solve this issue including portable hard drives and setting special classrooms for particular courses. These strategies all have had limited success and students have had limited access to the environments outside of class time. With virtualization we are hoping to solve these problems and possibly find ideas for delivering computer technology courses for the web based e-learning environment.
Comments»
Alan,
Just wanted to say how much I enjoy reading your blog. I don’t always understand everything but manage to learn some new things anyway!
Marilyn
Marilyn,
This is one more step to being able to teach all of our courses over the web. The web is changing Education.
Thank you for your comments.
Alan