Cloud-based virtual labs vs. low-cost physical labs: what engineering students think

The educational courses that fall into Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) category require an extensive practical training in laboratories, in order to build and strengthen students’ skills, thereby preparing them for a future job market. In particular, the significant advancements in computer science and engineering press an urgent need to rethink the core of the existing academic courses, their objectives, and the tools for the practical work, due to the need to maintain the balance between the knowledge that academia provides to the students and the actual requirements for students’ future job vacancies. To this end, our educational research includes the design and development of two different types of laboratories, i.e., a low-cost Raspberry Pi-based laboratory, and a laboratory in the cloud, for the practical teaching of the course Distributed systems. In this paper, we present the valuable feedback from our undergraduate students for both types of the aforementioned experimentation approaches, thereby unraveling the pros and cons of both, and analyzing the existing challenges that still need to be properly tackled.