Gangbing Song

Virtual and Remote Laboratory Development: A Review

The Internet technology has provided additional teaching strategies, with online education being one of the most exciting enhancements. A particular challenge for online education in engineering is how to extend the traditional hands-on laboratories to the Internet. Currently, there are two approaches to conducting labs online, virtual and remote labs. Virtual lab is based on software to simulate the lab environment while remote lab, by definition, is an experiment which is conducted and controlled remotely through the Internet. These experiments use real components or instrumentation at a different location from where they are being controlled or conducted. There are many emerging technologies which have been used to develop the virtual and remote laboratory. However, there are few papers that review the virtual and remote laboratory development. In this paper, a review of the different online delivery methods for virtual and remote laboratory development is presented. The open research issues and conclusion with possible future directions on the virtual and remote engineering laboratory development is also presented.

Design of a New Mobile-Optimized Remote Laboratory Application Architecture for M-Learning

As mobile learning (M-Learning) has demonstrated increasing impacts on online education, more and more mobile applications are designed and developed for the M-Learning. In this paper, a new mobile-optimized application architecture using Ionic framework is proposed to integrate the remote laboratory into mobile environment for the M-Learning. With this mobile-optimized application architecture, remote experiment applications can use a common codebase to deploy native-like applications on many different mobile platforms such as iOS, Android, Windows Mobile, and Blackberry. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed new architecture for M-Learning, an innovative remote networked proportional–integral–derivative control experiment has been successfully implemented based on this new application architecture. The performance is validated by the Baidu mobile cloud testing bed.

A Novel Wiki-Based Remote Laboratory Platform for Engineering Education

With the unprecedented growth of e-learning, more and more new IT technologies are used to develop e-learning tools. As one of the most common forms of social computing, Wiki technology has been used to develop the collaborative and cooperative learning platform to support multiple users learning online effectively. In this paper, we propose a new software architecture to create a novel wiki-based remote laboratory platform by combining the advantages of both Wiki technology and remote laboratory technology. This platform is implemented based on a unified framework for remote laboratory development and an open source wiki software package, MediaWiki. To illustrate the effectiveness of this platform, two remote experiments, Smart Vibration Platform (SVP) and Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) motor speed control, are integrated into this platform. This new wiki-based remote laboratory has been used for teaching Mechanical Engineering courses and creating students’ assignments at the University of Houston.

Develop a scheduler and federated authentication for remote laboratory access

This paper addresses the needs of authentication and authorization when the target engineering experiment objects are exported from the experiments provide server to an end user experiment scheduler web server (SWS). We discuss our solution based on using a novel unified framework for engineering experiment objects and integrating the MD5 encryption and decryption algorithm based security management engine for a federated authentication and authorization uniform resource locator (URL). The established remote engineering laboratory at Texas A&M University at Qatar (TAMUQ) demonstrates the efficiency of proposed SWS and authentication method.