Leveraging Cloud Infrastructures for Teaching Advanced Computer Engineering Classes

In the framework of Problem-Based Learning (PBL), hands-on activities play a crucial role for allowing students to acquire skills and competences. PBL is particularly suitable for teaching advanced courses including topics such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing and big data. In order to carry out practical activities, students may need specific computing and storage infrastructures, that may be not physically available in the laboratories. Thus, virtualization tools and cloud computing are often adopted for building Virtual Lab for teaching purposes. In this work, we present our recent experiences, at the University of Pisa, in delivering two advanced courses, namely Cloud Computing and Large-Scale and Multi-Structured Databases. We discuss how we built and exploited a Virtual Lab on top of the private Cloud infrastructure of the University of Pisa as a support for the teaching-learning workflow. Moreover, we present the quantitative feedback received by the students about their experience with the Virtual Lab, showing that the learning objectives that we fixed for our courses have been fully achieved.