The open source virtual lab : a case study

E-Learning is becoming a standard issue for Information Technologies degree courses. Video lessons, on-line exercises, and didactic forums, with interactions with tutors and teachers are already provided by current on-line degree courses. Within this scenario, there is a lack of virtual environments to allow students to make real experiences on network programming and configuration. In order to plug this gap, within the on-line degree course of ``Security of Informatics Systems and Networks'' provided by University of Milan, our group designed and realized the Virtual Lab, to offer to students a complete training environment accessible via web directly from normal web browser. This paper describes our fully open source solution and supplies a road map for other future works on virtual laboratories and online teaching.