Qualitative Evaluation of Software Maintenance Services Integrated in a Virtual Learning Environment

Evaluation of virtual learning environments and integrated services provides valuable feedback to educators how to improve the quality of education and the provided services. Virtual laboratories are complex learning environments that include diverse hardware and software components. Due to the inherent complexity of these environments, their maintenance is a challenging and demanding task, but most often neglected. This article presents an approach to integration and qualitative evaluation of software change request services within a complex virtual learning environment based on a virtual network laboratory. The services were integrated with the aim to facilitate software maintenance activities in the learning environment. The evaluation of the services was conducted with the goal to discover their advantages, disadvantages, and based on them possible improvements. Based on the proposed research objective, qualitative research methods were selected. The evaluation was based on input from 22 final year undergraduates and nine graduate students at the Department of Information Technology. The collected data include participants' answers to open-ended questionnaire questions and field notes taken by the researchers. The detailed description of advantages provides the evidence of the services' usability, while discovered disadvantages form the basis for directing further improvements of the services and the learning environment. The detailed description of the research context, used methods, research process, as well as the research findings provides a guideline for conducting similar researches aimed at evaluating various types of services in learning environments.