# Students' Acceptance and Tracking of a New Container-Based Virtual Laboratory
## 1 Introduction  
The emergence of new technologies with different capabilities to access and employ Internet resources as services is becoming of great interest these days [1]. These technologies allow systems to increment their efficiency and adaptation to different environments. The learning process of these relevant technologies is especially interesting within the context of a distance education methodology, such as the one employed in the National University for Distance Education (UNED) in Spain. In this institution, there are not face-to-face lectures in the learning/teaching process. Hence, a key part of its methodology is the development of new tools and techniques for the students to benefit from them during this process. When it comes to Engineering, practical activities within the subjects are usually especially helpful for the students to acquire the expected skills and competences. Among various drawbacks because of the fact of the digitization of society, cybersecurity is presently a particularly interesting issue. Companies need cybersecurity trained staff [2]. Therefore, Engineering professionals must learn about these topics and, even, more important with a lot of practiceto develop their critical thinking [3]. For this purpose, appropriate equipment, both physical and remote, must be provided to the students, in order to ease their professional training and the acquisition of the main skills related to it. This equipment is also important for evaluating the performance of the students during their learning process. In this context, it is clear that infrastructures such as virtual and remote laboratories, which are being widely used presently, must be analyzed for determining their pros and cons regarding those objectives. Besides those technologies, various successful tools aimed at promoting meaningful learning in the field of cybersecurity can be found in the literature [4; 5; 6]. Additionally, virtual laboratories are presently contributing to the sustainability of higher education, even more when the learning methodology is on distance [7]. This is the particular case of UNED, in which the number of students enrolled in the virtual platform of a subject may become very high. This way, the technologies provided to students during their learning process must be able to support all of them in the development of the practical exercises related to a subject, in terms of scalability, resource allocation, and so on. It is very important to keep a good quality of the learning design of virtual courses, in a similar way to the face-to-face classroom. To achieve this, the proposed technologies for virtual courses (in our case, a virtual laboratory based on containers) must be tested with students in terms of their acceptance ad behavior, since they are resources focused on improving the quality of virtual courses [8]. Consequently, this paper proposes and evaluates a container-based virtual laboratory (CVL), using Linux Docker virtualization technology [9]. This kind of technology allows for the creation of consistent, realistic, and light virtual laboratory environments. The developed laboratory has been used in a real scenario with students, in the context of a \"Cybersecurity\" subject with an education methodology on distance. The subject is into the \"Computer Science Engineering\" degree at the Computer Science Engineering Faculty at UNED. The obtained results will be comparatively analyzed with the students' experience in a previous academic year, studying the students' acceptance [10; 11] of the CVL technology, and their interactions with the virtual platform in the evaluation, forum, and content items. Therefore, the main contributions of this work are: (1) A complete virtualized network based on containers is locally available for each student with independent access, by taking the role of a junior security technician for a company.