James L. Hardison

The iLab Shared Architecture: A Web Services Infrastructure to Build Communities of Internet Accessible Laboratories

The Massachusetts Institute of Technologys iLab project has developed a distributed software toolkit and middleware service infrastructure to support Internet-accessible laboratories and promote their sharing among schools and universities on a worldwide scale. The project starts with the assumption that the faculty teaching with online labs and the faculty or academic departments that provide those labs are acting in two roles with different goals and concerns. The iLab architecture focuses on fast platform-independent lab development, scalable access for students, and efficient management for lab providers while preserving the autonomy of the faculty actually teaching the students. Over the past two years, the iLab architecture has been adopted by an increasing number of partner universities in Europe, Australia, Africa, Asia, and the United States. The iLab project has demonstrated that online laboratory use can scale to thousands of students dispersed on several continents.

Deploying interactive remote labs using the iLab Shared Architecture

The MIT iLab project has developed a distributed service infrastructure and software toolkit to support a scalable community of online laboratory experiments. The iLab shared architecture provides a framework for the development and deployment of remote laboratories using a three-tiered model based on Web services consisting of lab clients, service broker middleware, and lab servers. This simplifies the development of remote labs by providing reusable components for common lab administration functions. The initial focus of the iLab project was on hatched labs, which require no interactive control. Following the projectpsilas success in supporting these labs, it has expanded its efforts to include those requiring interactive control. Interactive labs require that the user have active control of lab instruments during the course of an experiment and can generate a large amount of data. In order to accommodate these requirements, the iLab shared architecture has been extended with a highly configurable lab resource scheduling service, a robust data storage system and support for high bandwidth communication between the lab client and server. By integrating these services into the iLab shared architecture, a more diverse set of educationally valuable labs can now be easily deployed online and shared around the world.

Integration view of Web Labs and Learning Management Systems

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

A Versatile Internet-Accessible Electronics Workbench with Troubleshooting Capabilities

The MIT iLab Project was established to expand the range of laboratory experiences available to students in science and engineering education. iLabs are online laboratories that enable students to conduct real experiments remotely. Recently, the iLab Project has focused on building remote laboratories around the NI-ELVIS platform, an all-in-one electronics workbench. This paper will detail our recent efforts in expanding the capabilities of ELVIS-based iLabs by enabling students to test and debug digital and analog circuits. This work will enable students to perform remote experiments characterizing digital logic elements. By merging switching capabilities with the Digital Multimeter available on the ELVIS, students will have the ability to examine and troubleshoot circuits. These added capabilities will provide educators and students with unparalleled flexibility and significantly enrich the remote laboratory experience.

Sharing Laboratories across Different Remote Laboratory Systems

An educational remote laboratory is a software and hardware tool that enables students to remotely access real equipment located in the university as if they were in a hands-on-lab session. In order to be able to increase the curricula of universities, software infrastructures and toolkits that make the development and maintenance of remote laboratories easier arose, such as the MIT iLab project, the Labshare Sahara project, or WebLab-Deusto. Making different systems collaborate at infrastructure level is highly desirable so as to successfully share laboratories with different characteristics. This contribution summarizes the integration of WebLab-Deusto laboratories inside the iLab Shared Architecture, as well as the integration of iLab batch laboratories inside WebLab-Deusto.

Three online neutron beam experiments based on the iLab Shared Architecture

Students at MIT have traditionally executed certain experiments in the containment building of the MIT nuclear reactor as part of courses in Nuclear Engineering and the third year laboratory course for Physics majors. A joint team of faculty and research staff from the MIT Nuclear Reactor Laboratory (MIT-NRL) and MITs Center for Educational Computing Initiatives have implemented online versions of three classic experiments; (a) a determination of MIT reactor coolant temperature through measurement of thermal neutron velocity, (b) a demonstration of the DeBroglie relationship of the kinetic energy and momentum of thermal neutrons and study of Bragg diffraction through a single copper crystal at various orientations, and (c) a measurement of beam depletion using a variety of shielding filters. These online experiments were implemented using the LabVIEW® virtual instrumentation package and the interactive version of the iLab Shared Architecture (ISA). Initial assessment of the online experiments indicates that they achieve comparable educational outcomes to traditional versions of the labs executed in the reactor containment building.

Enabling Remote Design and Troubleshooting Experiments Using the iLab Shared Architecture

12th Biennial International Conference on Engineering, Construction, and Operations in Challenging Environments; and Fourth NASA/ARO/ASCE Workshop on Granular Materials in Lunar and Martian Exploration Honolulu, Hawaii, United States March 14-17, 2010