# Students' Acceptance and Tracking of a New Container-Based Virtual Laboratory
## 3 Methods
### Students' Acceptance  
As for acceptance evaluation, students were surveyed with respect to the virtual laboratory based on containers, CVL. Each question must be answered with a five-point liker-type scale, ranging from (1) strongly disagree to (5) strongly agree. These are based on the presented factors for this work (PU, EE, A, SI, EA, IU), already detailed in Section 3.2). All statements are detailed in Appendix A. Figure 9 is a radar chart that shows the values for factors from the survey, regarding the experiences inside the academic years 2017-2018 and 2018-2019. A radar chart is a graph made up of a sequence of equi-angular spokes, named radii, each of them representing one of the factors. The size of each spoke depends on the corresponding value of the factor depending on both the maximum and minimum possible values. A line is drawn connecting the values for each factor spoke. The resulting graph is like a blue star for the experience presented in this work, and a red star for the previous experience with the LoT@UNED platform in the 2017-2018 academic year [29]. Values are \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c} \hline \hline
**Demographic** & & **2017–2018 (\%)** & **2018–2019 (\%)** \\ \hline Gender & Male & 89.15\% & 89.47\% \\  & Female & 10.85\% & 10.53\% \\ \hline Age Group & \(\leq\)30 years & 30.23\% & 18.43\% \\  & 30–40 years & 42.64\% & 36.84\% \\  & 40–50 years & 24.03\% & 36.84\% \\  & \(\geq\)50 years & 3.10\% & 7.89\% \\ \hline Familiarity & Very unfamiliar & 28.68\% & 18.42\% \\ with & Unfamiliar & 18.60\% & 15.79\% \\ Cybersecurity & Neutral & 24.03\% & 28.95\% \\  & Familiar & 12.41\% & 23.68\% \\  & Very Familiar & 16.28\% & 13.16\% \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 1: Summary of Demographic Data. as opposed to 3.93 out of 5 in the previous year, while the \"estimated effort\" decreases from one year to the following (from 4.13 to 3.89), probably due to the additional effort of learning some concepts regarding the Linux Docker technology. Regarding \"attitude\", the score increases from the academic year 2017-2018 (4.11 points) to 2018-2019 (4.51 points). The perceived \"ease of access\", which considers both the virtual laboratory and associated resources, also increases from 3.40 to 4.03, as well as the \"social influence\" (3.89 versus 3.67). Students consider more probable to use the virtual laboratory in the future, according to the score of the indicator \"intention of use\", which increases from 4.04 in the academic year 2017-2018 to 4.37 in the following one. Standard deviation ranges from 0.49 to 0.85 considering all indicators of academic year 2018-2019. Tables 3 and 4 compare the detailed results regarding the opinion survey between the academic years 2017-2018 and 2018-2019. In general, the main results show a small improvement from the first year to the second one. 95% of the students consider the experience to be useful or strongly useful for their learning, and 80% seen the platform as easy to use (agreeing or strongly agreeing with it), hence useful for improving their performance on the assessment. The students' opinion is also influenced by a social factor (65% of agreement), and they also show high scores in \"attitude\" and \"ease of access\". Finally, the \"intention of use\" of the laboratory in the future is high for 85% of the students, regarding Engineering subjects. Validating Hypotheses of the Proposed SEM Models  
After performing a confirmatory analysis to the defined SEM model, Figure 10 shows the suitability the proposed initial hypotheses (_H1...H5_) regarding the obtained results. The influence of the hypotheses when using LoT@UNED, in academic year 2017-2018, is represented in Figure 10a, whereas this influence regarding the CVL technology used in academic year 2018-2019 is represented in Figure 10b. In both, each arrow is labeled with the reliable influence value for each hypothesis. The higher this value, the stronger the influence of the origin node over the sink node.