Presently, the ever-increasing use of new technologies helps people to acquire additional skills for developing an applied critical thinking in many contexts of our society. When it comes to education, and more particularly in any Engineering subject, practical learning scenarios are key to achieve a set of competencies and applied skills. In our particular case, the cybersecurity topic with a distance education methodology is considered and a new remote virtual laboratory based on containers will be presented and evaluated in this work. The laboratory is based on the Linux Docker virtualization technology, which allows us to create consistent realistic scenarios with lower configuration requirements for the students. The laboratory is comparatively evaluated with our previous environment, LoT@UNED, from both the points of view of the students’ acceptance with a set of UTAUT models, and their behavior regarding evaluation items, time distribution, and content resources. All data was obtained from students’ surveys and platform registers. The main conclusion of this work is that the proposed laboratory obtains a very high acceptance from the students, in terms of several different indicators (perceived usefulness, estimated effort, social influence, attitude, ease of access, and intention of use). Neither the use of the virtual platform nor the distance methodology employed affect the intention to use the technology proposed in this work.

Architectural modules based on dual citizen and government participation platforms provide an economically viable way to implement, standardize, and scale services and information exchange-functions essential to citizens' participation in a smart city democracy.

Our society is nowadays evolving towards a digital era, due to the extensive use of computer technologies and their interconnection mechanisms, i.e., social networks, Internet resources, IoT services, etc. This way, new threats and vulnerabilities appear. Therefore, there is an urgent necessity of training students in the topic of cybersecurity, in which practical skills have to be acquired. In distance education, the inclusion of on-line resources for hands-on activities in its curricula is a key step in meeting that need. This work presents several contributions. First, the fundamentals of a virtual remote laboratory hosted in the cloud are detailed. This laboratory is a step forward since the laboratory combines both virtualization and cloud paradigms to dynamically create emulated environments. Second, this laboratory has also been integrated into the practical curricula of a cybersecurity subject, as an additional on-line resource. Third, the students’ traceability, in terms of their interactions with the laboratory, is also analyzed. Psychological TAM/UTAUT factors (perceived usefulness, estimated effort, social influence, attitude, ease of access) that may affect the intention of using the laboratory are analyzed. Fourth, the degree of satisfaction is analyzed with a great impact, since the mean values of these factors are most of them higher than 4 points out of 5. In addition to this, the students’ acceptance of the presented technology is exhaustively studied. Two structural equation models have been hypothesized and validated. Finally, the acceptance of the technology can be concluded as very good in order to be used in other Engineering contexts. In this sense, the calculated statistical values for the improved proposed model are within the expected ranges of reliability (X2 = 0.6, X2/DF = 0.3, GFI = 0.985, CIF = 0.985, RMSEA = 0) by considering the literature.

New tools within the e-Justice field are emerging helped by advances in technology as well as the social changes given by the Information & Knowledge Society, but the judiciary is often considered as a conservative field, traditionally very formalized and pre-established, where legal actors have rigid roles to interact. Electronic justice is an essential part of e- Administration within the justice field for shaping a modern public administration of justice, and openness in public services is becoming more and more a key concept. In this paper, we show a projection of these concepts in a new software introduced as a real case, deployed and put into operation in a court of last instance. A closer and more citizen-centric approach has been the starting point for development and can be a model for promoting research in e-justice for all audiences, experts and amateurs. This work provides an innovative vision of e-justice ICT based on the concept of closer to citizens as a key element in the development of ICT in legal issues. For this purpose the factors that make electronic justice is introduced, putting in context the research in the legal field and how a more open justice with the citizen as the first requirement for a judicial system can be considered. Finally a real implementation is presented.

Problem-based learning is a widely used learning methodology in the field of technological disciplines, especially in distance education environments. In these environments, the most used tools, which provide learning scenarios, are remote and virtual laboratories. Internet of Things (IoT) devices can be used as remote or virtual laboratories. In addition to this, they can be organized/orchestrated to build remote maker spaces through the web. These types of spaces are called the Web of Things (WoT). This paper proposes the use of these types of spaces and their integration as practical activities into the curricula of technological subjects. This approach will allow us to achieve two fundamental objectives: (1) To improve the academic results (grades) of students; and (2) to increase engagement and interest of students in the studied technologies, including IoT devices. These platforms are modeled using archetypes based on different typologies and usage scenarios. In particular, these usage scenarios will implement a learning strategy for each problem to be solved. The current work shows the evolution of these archetypes and their application in the teaching of disciplines/subjects defined in computer science, such as distributed computing and cybersecurity.

This paper shows a design based on distributed architectures for a remote laboratory to learn cybersecurity and infrastructure protection systems. Distributed architectures, especially those supported by virtualization and cloud computing, along with other emerging technologies such as Game-based Learning (GBL), currently are a hot trend in educational and professional fields. Around this idea, a key is the concept of educational piece as meaning an element of instructional design where is including a suitable game. Therefore, each piece is characterized. These points among others allow us to plan the game-based lab design and to determine most appropriate time for each learning activity. Eventually, a game-piece-based architecture is able to deploy a kind of laboratories on cybersecurity and critical infrastructures, but that can be generalized for educational activities in other fields. This method provides a coherent reasoning to learning objectives and enough flexibility within a teaching program. In order to get a consistent and effective overcome, a laboratory implementation requires nowadays communication systems, hosts, some virtualization or cloud services, particularly for remote learning, but even for improving the traditional computer classrooms.