A Remote Hands-on Exercise Environment for an Asia-Wide Real-Time Workshop

This paper discusses the problems of conducting a real-time workshop, where the instructors and the participants are located in different places, and the participants should perform hands-on lab exercises using computers that are located in another place. To address this problem, we implemented a remote hands-on exercise environment using virtual machines and a low-bandwidth remote console access. In this environment, the instructors can monitor each participant's exercise progress thus they can give specific feedbacks to the participants. We evaluated this environment using a real-time online workshop. We found that it was easy to setup, and participants had a good user-experience using this environment