INNOVATION TOOL TO EASE EVALUATION TASKS IN COMPUTER HETEROGENEOUS ENVIRONMENTS USING SOFTWARE CONTAINERS

The use of new technologies greatly facilitates teaching by encouraging participation and increasing the pedagogical alternatives. Many university subjects base their practical content on the use of software for the development of simulation or programming exercises. Due to the proliferation and low-cost of high-capacity personal technological terminals, as well as the wireless broadband available both in private homes and on university campuses, these practices have acquired a remarkable non-presence character and gained a significant importance in the teacher evaluation. However, this technological expansion of personal devices has resulted in a great heterogeneity of models, operating systems, office applications, development tools, etc., which most of them have the same problem: incompatibility even between near versions of the same platform. This severely complicates the evaluation work, since the technological environment of development used by the student on his laptop or at the educational center and that used by the teacher usually present compatibility troubles not related to the student work.

In some centers, reference devices identical to the one used by the teacher for evaluation are made available to the student, but this does not prevent from the necessary adaptation problems that are beyond the content of the subject-matter. In other cases, even in business environments, virtualized machines that allow to homogenize the environment of development and correction are being used. Nevertheless, this solution is expensive in terms of resources, performance and communications.

In this article we suggest the use of a recent technology named “docker” that allows to introduce in a “software container” all the necessary resources for the execution of the student work. In this way, the teacher can execute the practice using the same environment in which it has been created, so that he can avoid the problems derived from customizations or configuration errors, unrelated to the work developed by the student, but which prevent from the correct revision thereof.

We have developed a web tool making use of the docker technology. It makes available to a student, through his personal device, the delivery of not only the files that contain his personal work but also the files that make possible to replicate the used environment. It enables users to keep track of deliveries, check the reception and correction status, as well as consult the qualification. On the other hand, the teacher can create tasks or groups to facilitate a framework for delivering practices, correcting them and reporting qualifications. In addition to this, automatic notification mechanisms, usage statistics and monitoring of student activity are incorporated.

This tool is being used in the field of end-of-degree work and has proven to be of great usefulness in comparison to traditional delivery through other repository types.