Alberto Pesquera

Remote labs as learning services in the educational arena

Technology-enhanced learning is not just interacting with learning objects. Physical labs are another useful resource in education, especially for engineering and science education. They are confined to the physical location they are bound to. It is obviously interesting for any learning process to be able to open up this access from remote locations in the same effective way as learning objects are accessed through a Learning Management System, taking advantage of the provided services, such as authentication, group building, etc.

State of Art, Initiatives and New Challenges for Virtual and Remote Labs

Until a few decades ago, face to face classrooms and hand-on laboratories were the common solution for teaching theory and practice. But, new e-Learning tools have emerged and learning methodologies such as blended and distance learning have taken an important space in learning initiatives. Among them are virtual and remote Labs which provide student with a learning environment where can carry out the experiments through Internet and acquire the needed skills to develop his future jobs. This paper describes the importance of virtual and remote labs and their usage in learning scenarios.

VISIR deployment in undergraduate engineering practices

Practical sessions are the backbone of qualification in engineering education. It leads to a better understanding and allows mastering scientific concepts and theories. The lack of the availability of practical sessions at many universities and institutions owing to the cost and the unavailability of instructors the most of the time caused a significant decline in experimentation in engineering education over the last decades. Recently, with the progress of computer-based learning, remote laboratories have been proven to be the best alternative to the traditional ones, regarding to its low cost and ubiquity. Some universities have already started to deploy remote labs in their practical sessions. This contribution compiles diverse experiences based on the deployment of the remote laboratory, Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality (VISIR), on the practices of undergraduate engineering grades at various universities within the VISIR community. It aims to show the impact of its usage on engineering education concerning the assessments of students and teachers as well.

Shareable educational architectures for remote laboratories

The proliferation of remote laboratories in multiple disciplines of science has removed the cost and administration burdens that hinder the adoption of practical sessions in engineering education. Remote laboratories provide online workbenches unconstrained by neither temporal nor geographical considerations and allow an interactive learning that maintains student attention. Recently, remote laboratories have been developed at multiple universities and adopted in engineering education. Furthermore, some of these laboratories are replicated at many universities such as the electronic circuits remote labs: NetLab, VISIR, and labs based on NI ELVIS II. This was the commence of a new mainstream which advocates a better remodeling of those laboratories to allow their allocation, sharing among universities, and their communication with other heterogeneous systems, e.g., Learning Management Systems (LMS). In this context, numerous sharable educational architectures for remote labs integration have emerged such as LiLa, Lab2go, ISILab, DCL, WebLab Deusto, iLab (ISA), and Labshare (Sahara). This paper reports on the emerging solutions for remote laboratories implementation and deployment in engineering education in an efficient way. The paper discusses different integration scenarios pointing out features, limitations, and upcoming challenges.

Challenges of applying online learning tools in distance learning courses

Online learning tools, such as courseware, learning management system, assessment tools, virtual, and remote laboratories are used in blended and distance learning. These online tools, Apart from being able to provide learning activities, allow displaying learning resources such as web pages, pdf or doc files and multimedia contents. This paper describes some online learning tools and the challenges to apply them in distance learning.

Labor-oriented online master degree program

This contribution reports on a new European project, Remote-labs Access in Internet-based Performance-Centered Learning Environment for Curriculum Support (RIPLECS), in which an official inter-institutional European master degree program in Information and Communication System (ICS) is created. The program is conducted online across five European institutions and is oriented to labor market needs for qualified graduates, with special focus on realizing real-world experiments in each subject remotely. The network architecture of RIPLECS platform enables world-wide distribution of learning resources by utilizing multiple Web servers at several European universities, within a single network topology. The paper discusses the project development stages, implementation and the expected outcomes.

Deconstructing VLEs to create customized PLEs

Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) have gained importance over recent years thanks to the wide use of the Web 2.0. An interesting functionality is the creation of customized PLEs, to improve the learning process. This work proposes a new paradigm to create customized PLEs by deconstructing a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).

dotLAB: Integrating remote labs in dotLRN

Nowadays, there are a great number of universities and organizations working in e-learning solutions. One of most well-known is the learning management system or LMS that allow displaying theoretical content in an organized and controlled way. In some jobs and studies it is necessary that the student get a practical knowledge as well as a theoretical knowledge. To obtain this practical knowledge, the universities and organizations are developing virtual labs and Web labs. At these moments the LMS and Web labs are working independently. We are designing and developing a new architecture allowing the integration of the LMS with different Web labs from different universities. This architecture must allow the student, teachers and administrators to use the LMSs services and virtual labs as if he was working with the same software‥

Design, development and implementation of remote laboratories in distance electronics, control and computer subjects

Remote laboratories are a good alternative to traditional laboratories in distance learning, due to students can carry out experiment from anywhere and at anytime. This possibility of providing students with online experiment across Internet has done that professors from electrical and computer engineering department of Spanish University for Distance Learning start to design, develop and implement remote laboratories. This paper is a description of design, development and implementation of some of the remote laboratories, developed by electrical and computer engineering department, and the educational fields that they cover, such as control, electronic and computer.

Fingerprint verification system in tests in moodle

This research describes the method of combining traditional authentication (password and username) with biometric technology, specifically fingerprint authentication. This authentication model is applied in distance education where courses are developed in learning management systems. It introduces the features of distance education as well as the biometric sensor operation. It describes the changes that are necessary to introduce in the learning management system in order to use the fingerprint as a data in the process of authentication. Finally, we performed tests of assessment the new authentication system in lab sessions at the college.