This paper reports on a state-of-the-art remote laboratory project called Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality (VISIR). VISIR allows wiring and measuring of electronic circuits remotely on a virtual workbench that replicates physical circuit breadboards. The wiring mechanism is developed by means of a relay switching matrix connected to a PCI eXtensions for Instrumentation (PXI) instrumentation platform. The entire equipment is controlled by LabVIEW server software, in addition to a measurement server software that protects the equipment from hazard connections by verifying input circuit designs, sent by students, before being executed. This paper addresses other approaches such as remote labs based on Data Acquisition Cards (DAQs), NetLab, and RemotElectLab, comparing them with VISIR in order to emphasize its singularity. Topics discussed are as follows: the technical description, software, operation cycle, features, and provided services. In addition, the feedback received by students at several universities and the encountered drawbacks along with the proposed solutions are highlighted. The paper finally addresses the ongoing and future challenges within the VISIR community including its integration with Learning Management Systems (LMSs) and iLab Shared Architecture (ISA), its new hardware version release that is based on LAN eXtensions for Instrumentation (LXI), and its new open platform version that supports federated access.

Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality (VISIR) for Remote Wiring and Measurement of Electronic Circuits on Breadboard

It is apparent that implementation of practical sessions in engineering education paves the way for students to be familiar with instruments and, thus, with the industrial real world. In recent decades, the high cost and administration burdens of physical equipment have caused a significant decline in experimentation within engineering education. This situation has fostered the development and adoption of remote laboratories as a replacement. Recently, remote laboratories based on a large variety of technologies have been developed at multiple universities and adopted in industrial electronics engineering education. Furthermore, some of these laboratories are replicated at many universities. This was the commencement of a new mainstream that advocates a better remodeling of those laboratories to allow their allocation, sharing among universities, and their interoperable communication with other heterogeneous educational systems, e.g., learning management systems (LMSs). This article, on the one hand, reports on the design of the state-of-the-art remote laboratories for industrial electronics disciplines along with the cutting-edge technologies adopted. On the other hand, the article sheds light on the outstanding interoperable educational remote laboratories architectures, classifying them with regard to their exclusive features and provided services, and pointing out the limitations of each.

Expanding the Boundaries of the Classroom: Implementation of Remote Laboratories for Industrial Electronics Disciplines

Many studies have shown that laboratory activities increase students’ achievements and interest in the subject matters and further help their learning, especially in disciplines such as sciences, engineering, computing and others. Advances in technologies and communication networks have created the possibility to develop virtual and remote labs providing new opportunities for both on-campus and remote students circumventing certain limitations of physical laboratories. In this paper, we review contemporary remote and virtual laboratory implementations in different disciplines. Our review and analysis uncover a number of interesting observations, findings and insights into virtual and remote laboratory implementations. Virtual and remote laboratories provide a number of advantages such as remote 24 × 7 access, flexibility and freedom to learn at one’s own pace and reset/retrial experiments without wasting resources in a safe environment and provide new opportunities for learning. We observe that these labs when incorporated with sound pedagogical framework, learner support, content and tutor interaction result in higher learning outcomes and richer learning experience. Future work will evolve to implement innovative labs in different education contexts taking advantage of technological advances. Collaboration, catering to different learner personalities, impact of learning outcomes, pedagogical frameworks for virtual and remote labs are areas for further investigation.

A review of contemporary virtual and remote laboratory implementations: observations and findings

This paper gives a focussed summary of good practice taken primarily from engineers who are responsible for teaching topics related to systems and control This engineering specialisation allows th

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A survey of good practice in control education

Remote laboratories are software and hardware tools that allow students to remotely access real equipment located in universities. The integration of remote laboratories in learning tools (learning management systems, content management systems, or personal learning environments) has been achieved to integrate remote laboratories as part of the learning curricula. A cross-institutional initiative called gateway4labs has been created to perform this integration extensible to multiple remote laboratories in multiple learning tools. This contribution focuses on describing this initiative and, in particular, how opening it to public systems (where users do not need to be registered) produces new technical and organizational challenges due to the public availability of labs. In addition, this contribution shows integrations of systems that were not previously addressed in this initiative, such as PhET or ViSH, as well as a new approach for integrating supported laboratories in external specifications such as the smart device one through OpenSocial.

An Extensible Architecture for the Integration of Remote and Virtual Laboratories in Public Learning Tools

The integration of Learning Management Systems and specific learning support applications known as Web Labs (remote and virtual laboratories) are the target of a new wave of service-oriented applications devoted to improving on-line learning experiences. Nowadays these solution works in a separet way therefore the students teachers, administration must log in different systems, the are not reusing services, etc. For these an other reasion in this paper we are focus in two topics. In one hand we describe a technique to present a web lab through a browser delivered by an LMS as a part of SCORM standard packaging. In other hand we describe a service-oriented architecture which allow integrating multiple LMSs (Moodle, .LRN, Claroline, etc.) with iLabs and multiples web an remote labs to supply the full functionality needed by educators

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Philip Baley

Papers

Integration view of Web Labs and Learning Management Systems