A Virtual Practical Training on Database Administration: A Further Development in Distance Education

. The Virtual University is an Internet-based learning environment developed at the University of Hagen that includes all aspects of a university. The project is experimenting with and evaluating different forms of teaching and learning. A new form of teaching is the virtual practical training. Our experiences show that the virtual practical training is leading towards a major quality improvement in distance education. All sorts of learning activities passive-receptive as well as active-expressive are part of the practical. Distributed teamwork and problem-solving hands-on activities were successfully integrated into this highly communicative teaching event. We are now developing a practical training on the subject of database administration, which makes further demands on system architecture and didactics. Introduction: Practical Trainings at the Virtual University The Virtual University In 1996 our group developed the Virtual University system, the first e-learning platform in Germany allowing universities to offer their services on the Internet (Mittrach, 1999). The Virtual University is Germany’s first university that offers all its services on the Internet. It has developed into a large platform with a student community of 15000 and more than 200 courses online (Feldmann & Schlageter, 2000). Seminars and practical trainings (short: practicals) are integrated into the Virtual University and students are given the opportunity of participating in highly communicative tutoring events like these (Feldmann-Pempe, Mittrach, Schlageter, 1999 and Becking & Schlageter 2002). Early assumptions that mostly technical oriented students would accept the VU and non-technical departments would participate poorly are disproved. “..after the first year more than half of the courses came from humanities.” (Feldmann & Schlageter, 2001). The University of Hagen offers practicals in various subjects like electrical engineering or technical computer science. Students travel from all over Germany, sometimes even from other European countries to Hagen to participate. These practicals require some days up to several weeks, which means that some of the participating students have to take all their leave days from work for one year to attend. Thus some practicals have been partly virtualized, e.g. the software practical, in which students develop large software solutions in distributed group work, but still have to attend physically at two events lasting about 2 to 3 weeks. Our students want for communication with other students and tutors which students at Campus Universities can easily and casually access e.g. meeting at the cafeteria. As described in (Becking et.al. 2004 Hong Kong, Motivation...) there are several implications following from these prerequisites: learning events should offer as much asynchronous communication as possible, should be carried out in groupwork, should be clearly structured so students can schedule their limited learning time, should be designed in a highly motivating form and should require no physical presence at the university at best. We developed and conducted practical-trainings lasting one semester which should comprise as many of these implications as possible. Virtual Practical Trainings on Database Modelling and Application Development Subjects and Topics We decided to take databases as the subject matter of our practical trainings. The subject is too extensive to deal with in one semester so a decision had to be made: how to scale down the subject. A horizontal cut would mean to be able to deal with the whole subject but in a rather poor complexity. A vertical cut would mean that not all the constituents of the subject matter would be treated but a part of them would be treated in all their complexity. We chose for a realistic assignment and because there are no job-postings for a “database-specialist caring for everything but only if it is not too catchy” we applied vertical downscaling. The first two practicals were on the subject of database modelling, implementing and testing. The third practical was about analysing a complex database model and developing an application on top of an existing database schema.