There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

Remote laboratories have been introduced during the last few decades into engineering education processes as well as integrated within e-learning frameworks offered to engineering and science students. Remote laboratories are also being used to support life-long learning and student's autonomous learning activities. In this paper, after a brief overview of state-of-the-art technologies in the development of remote laboratories and presentation of recent and interesting examples of remote laboratories in several areas related with industrial electronics education, some current trends and challenges are also identified and discussed.

Current Trends in Remote Laboratories

Three key issues should be addressed to enable universities to deliver engineers who have a solid documented laboratory experience enabling them to design goods and services complying with the requirements of a sustainable society. First, introduce learning objectives of engineering instructional laboratories in courses including laboratory components. Second, implement individual student assessment. Third, introduce free access to online experimental resources as a supplement to the equipment in traditional laboratories. Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH) in Sweden and the University of South Australia (UniSA) have created online laboratory workbenches for electrical experiments that mimic traditional ones by combining virtual and physical reality. Online workbenches not only supplement traditional ones, but they can also be used for low-cost individual assessment. BTH has started a project disseminating the BTH workbench concept, The Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality (VISIR) Open Laboratory Platform, and invites other universities to set up replicas and participate in further development and standardization. Further, online workbenches offer additional learning possibilities. UniSA has started a project where students located in different countries can perform experiments together as a way to enhance the participants' intercultural competence. This paper discusses online laboratory workbenches and their role in an engineering education appropriate for a sustainable society.

On Objectives of Instructional Laboratories, Individual Assessment, and Use of Collaborative Remote Laboratories

presents an overview of experiences related to remote laboratory usage for teaching and learning processes. This book was written by a group of authors under the supervision of editors Luis Gomes and Javier Garcia-Zubia. Gomes orga-nized a very successful special section in the December 2007 issue of

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Advances on remote laboratories and e-learning experiences

Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH) in Sweden has started a project known as VISIR (Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality) together with National Instruments in USA and Axiom EduTech in Sweden to disseminate an online laboratory concept created at BTH using open source technologies in collaboration with other universities and organizations. The concept is about adding a remote operation option to traditional instructional laboratories to make them more accessible, irrespective of whether the students are on campus or mainly off campus. The BTH option is equipped with a unique interface enabling students to recognize on their own computer screen the instruments and other equipment most of them have previously used in the local laboratory. The first remote control option implemented is for an electronics laboratory and the second one is for a signal processing laboratory with emphasis on mechanical vibration experiments. The electronics lab option features remote circuit wiring using a virtual breadboard and a relay switching matrix combination. The goal is an international standard, enabling teams worldwide to expand and develop jointly this powerful approach into distributed online laboratories by using standardized software such as IVI (Interchangeable Virtual Instruments) and equipment platforms such as PXI (PCI eXtensions for Instrumentation) and LXI (LAN eXtensions for Instrumentation).

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The VISIR project - an Open Source Software Initiative for Distributed Online Laboratories

Deeds is a simulation environment for e-learning in digital electronics. The simulators cover combinational and sequential logic networks, finite state-machine design, and microcomputer interfacing and programming. They are integrated together, and therefore allow the design and test of embedded digital systems. The environment guides students' activities by delivering learning materials through specialized browsers. An extensive collection of learning materials is available. This paper includes an example of activity on a problem assignment.

A Simulation Environment for e-Learning in Digital Design

The remote control of instrumentation is not enough to set up a remote laboratory. Several pedagogical, technical, and structural issues must be faced to obtain modular and scalable systems. This paper reports our experience in developing a remote laboratory system to teach electronics to information engineering students. Our target is to develop proper architectures and tools, to obtain an easy management of the system and a better pedagogical effectiveness. The approach used in describing the compo-nents of online experiments facilitates the upgrade of the laboratory and the sharing of experiments, defined as stan-dard learning objects. A particular attention has been paid to pedagogical issues. The main problems being investigated are: the lack of the support that students used to have in traditional labs, the reduced interaction with the objects under test, and the necessity of providing feedback to the experimenters.

A Modular and Extensible Remote Electronic Laboratory

The electronic laboratory: traditional, simulated or remote?

The NetPro project creates models, methods, tools and materials for network-based project learning in engineering education. This new environment is a distributed system that facilitates sharing and peer reviewing of project deliverables and interaction in special interest group discussions. The paper presents as an example the pilot course on Electronic Systems Design and its preliminary evaluation.

Electronic systems design: An experiment of project-based learning on network

Remote access to real laboratories can enhance traditional educational paths with practical experiences. However, most of the existing remote laboratories cannot communicate with each other and they are not yet completely integrated with common educational platforms such as Learning Management Systems. These problems could be tackled by offering to end users remote experiments as distributed services using web service technology. The paper examines the architectures of remote laboratories developed by three institutions: DIBE ISILab (Internet Shared Instrumentation Laboratory), HPI DCL (Distributed Control Laboratory) and MIT iLab. Their front-end services are compared and discussed. The paper details how end-user applications interact with these remote labs and reports on the results of a preliminary test of interoperability between remote labs, providing a hint on how different remote experiments can be shared between different institutions.

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Domenico Ponta

Papers

A Simulation Environment for e-Learning in Digital Design

A Modular and Extensible Remote Electronic Laboratory

The electronic laboratory: traditional, simulated or remote?

Electronic systems design: An experiment of project-based learning on network

Survey of Remote Laboratories Using Service Oriented Architectures