Conference Paper Presentation: FORGE Enabling FIRE Facilities for the eLearning Community ICL 2016 Conference Belfast.

1. FORGE ENABLING FIRE FACILITIES FOR
THE E-LEARNING COMMUNITY
Diarmuid Collins
Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

2. Engineering and Experimentation
• To understand the physics and
engineering phenomena in wireless
communications it is really important to
reinforce theory with experimentation
• The most effective way to demonstrate
such physical properties and impairments
of wireless signals is though radio
laboratories

3. Lab Experimentation
Physical Experimentation
• Expensive, in particular for
low-budget institutions
• Deploying and maintaining
experimental facilities is
costly
• Developing cutting edge
telecommunications
technologies requires
massive effort and budget
• Learners constrained by
location and lab opening
hours
• Underutilised
Online Experimentation
• Offers remote access to
resources.
• Not limited by time or
location
• Empowers education by
enabling hands on
experimentation
• FORGE focused on
enhancing online
telecommunications
engineering by enabling
remote experimentation

4. Future Internet Research and Experimentation
(FIRE)
• The FIRE initiative is a European
endeavor that promotes the
creation of wide-scale federations
of high performance testbed and
experimentation facilities for
Internet and network-related
research.
• €20 million
investment

5. E.g., Trinity College Dublin IRIS Testbed

6. FORGE
• Transforms FIRE testbeds into learning resources for education
• Educational Layer over FIRE testbed facilities
• Similar usage patterns between researcher & educational
learner
• Resources are discovered, selected, reserved, provisioned (OS and Tools)
• Experiment executed, controlled, monitored, results collected
• Resources release.

7. FORGE: Hidden Complexity
• Steps are Preconfigured and Automated
• Teacher – discover, select reserve, provision resources
• Student – web based control and monitoring elements
• Supported by:
• Widgets: micro-applications that perform a dedicated task
• Adapters: Backend scripts that interact with FIRE testbed facility

8. FORGE Reference Architecture

9. List of Recommendations (1)
• Reservation Mechanism
• Not available in all FIRE facilities
• Hidden from learners
• Integrates easily with widget + adapter
• Resource Scarcity
• Multiple learners use same experimentation resource
• Add multiplexing / queuing Layer
• Lab has clear pre/post/transition states.
• Maximum experiment duration
• E.g., 1 minute, three learners – iMinds w-ilab.t testbed.
• Level of control
• Software & hardware failure
• Watchdog programs, scripts, instructions to support experiment recovery

10. List of Recommendations (2)
• Multi-platform and easy integration to existing eLearning
platforms e.g., LMS, eBook, website, etc.
• User interactions should be collected with Learning Analytics
• Inclusive of lab reservations, student interactions, and so forth
• Learners should be uniquely identifiable (where possible)
• Possible to spot cheaters or improper resource usage
• Introduce xAPI actions and verbs
• E.g., User launched page
• E,g., User answered question
• Calculate action to action time spent by learners on course material

11. Challenges Encountered
• Authentication
• Learning analytics - Who is using course, How, etc.
• Security
• Block Anonymous access
• Securely share resources among multiple FIRE accounts
• Standardised Reservation API
• For reserving FIRE facilities
• Resource occupation: availability, scalability and scheduling
• Reassessed and redesigned
• Policy Strategy E.g., Best effort or premium
• Queuing mechanism
• A fallback mechanism – in case testbed does not work
• e.g., non-interactive version of lab

12. FORGE Contributions
• Promoting Awareness of FIRE Testbed facilities
• Methodology and process for using FIRE Testbed equipment
• FORGEBox architecture – reference architecture
• 18 courses (10 partner and 8 open call courses)
• WiFi, LTE, OFDM, IoT, TCP, HTTP, video streaming, and so forth.
• Taught worldwide in over 10 countries
• Over 2000 students
• Contributed to Standardisation
• IEEE P1876: Standard for Networked Smart Learning Objects for Online
Laboratories Working Group
• IEEE Actionable Data Book (ADB) for STEM Education
• SIG on Remote labs and Online Experimentation
• Publications: 9 Published

14. More information…
www.ict-forge.eu
info@ict-forge.eu
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This project has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research,
technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no. 610889