Reacting to COVID-19 campus imminent closure: Enabling remote networking laboratories via MOOCs
The concept of Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) brings the opportunity to adjust both the study content, and the context, based on the teaching needs. Therefore, in this paper, we present our best practices on enabling remote networking laboratories via Blackboard platform, including the Blackboard Collaborate Ultra extension, in order to efficiently react to the challenges of imminent campus closure imposed by COVID-19 breakout. We present an extensive survey as a feedback from students, which allowed us to measure and to quantify students’ experience and satisfaction with the remote teaching setup that successfully served 45 enrolled students. As the results bring the positive attitude towards practices presented in this paper, such teaching practices will foster some of the critical skills nowadays, such as collaboration, self-driven learning, and problem solving, and they can also serve as a successful example on how to efficiently cope with the limited access to traditional classroom resources within various courses.