Virtualized Computational Environments on the cloud to foster group skills through PBL: A case study in architecture

The ODISEA platform provides Virtualized Computational Environments (VCEs) on cloud providers as the computational infrastructure to support educational activities. A VCE consists of a collection of one or more Virtual Machines (VMs) to which the students connect from their own computers. In this paper a case study is presented in the architecture domain where a PBL activity is carried out in working groups. The study involves 293 students organized in 28 pilot groups that use customized VCEs created and deployed through the ODISEA platform on a Cloud, and 30 traditional groups that use a LMS platform. The VCE provides the software, hardware and specific configuration to ease the interrelation and cooperative work between the working groups, enhancing the process tracking and feedback gathering as well as providing a better organization of the teaching material. The results demonstrate that the VCE allows to improve the cooperative work, improving the final marks in the PBL developed by the pilot working groups. Also, an economical study is presented, highlighting the economic benefits of the Cloud with respect to traditional physical laboratories of PCs.