Javier Garcia-Zubia

Addressing Software Impact in the Design of Remote Laboratories

Remote Laboratories or WebLabs constitute a first-order didactic resource in engineering faculties. However, in many cases, they lack a proper software design, both in the client and server side, which degrades their quality and academic usefulness. This paper presents the main characteristics of a Remote Laboratory, analyzes the software technologies to implement the client and server sides in a WebLab, and correlates these technologies with the characteristics to facilitate the selection of a technology to implement a WebLab. The results obtained suggest the adoption of a Service Oriented Laboratory Architecture-based approach for the design of future Remote Laboratories so that client-agnostic Remote Laboratories and Remote Laboratory composition are enabled. The experience with the real Remote Laboratory, WebLab-Deusto, is also presented.

A Flexible and Configurable Architecture for Automatic Control Remote Laboratories

In this paper, we propose a novel approach in hardware and software architecture design for implementation of remote laboratories for automatic control. In our contribution, we show the solution with flexible connectivity at back-end, providing features of multipurpose usage with different types of experimental devices, and fully configurable client side application at front-end. The physical setup and communication principles of hardware architecture are based on two types of devices: the programmable logic controllers and industrial network routers. The user interface of client application is designed as a Web page, powered by optimized JavaScript, using the sophisticated on-the-fly content generation. To prove the suitability of the architecture, we compare it with other existing approaches of remote laboratory design. We evaluate their benefits and weaknesses, especially in terms of expense, implementation difficulty, and versatility of usage. In this paper, we also show a detailed example of remote laboratory implementation based on new architecture for thermo-optical educational system and provide three other examples of developed remote laboratories. Evaluation of remote laboratory usage and its benefits is provided to demonstrate the learning value of proposed architecture in education process.

Mobile Devices and Remote Labs in Engineering Education

The remote labs or WebLabs promote the experimentation in the studies of engineering allowing the access and control of real laboratory equipment through Internet. In general a WebLab is a client-server application where the client application can only be used from a PC, and it is not considered the use of mobile devices as potential clients. This is due to the fact that the WebLabs are designed from the hardware point of view, and not from the software engineering point of view. Any WebLab can be designed and implemented to be accessed using a mobile device, but only the AJAX technology can provide a unique solution for a wide range of platforms, including mobile devices. This work compares the different strategies to include mobile devices in remote labs and describes the benefits of using the AJAX approach.

Time to play with a microcontroller managed mobile bot

Although science, engineering, and technology have an influence on humanitys present and future challenges, many students lack even a fundamental knowledge in these disciplines. Science teachers are looking for new teaching models and tools that provide skills for entering careers these fields. During the last two decades academia has recognized education games as a beneficial instrument for this purpose. This paper presents first steps in the design and development of the online education game, based on the remote experiments - a microcontroller managed mobile bot (ROBOT). A scenario, architecture, and design of the game will be described. The technological restrictions of the remote experiments will be discussed.

Enabling mobile access to Remote Laboratories

Remote Laboratories constitute a first order didactic resource in engineering faculties. Their use from mobile devices to increase the availability of the experiments at the laboratory is a challenge highly coupled to the requirements established by each experiment. This paper will present and compare the main strategies for adapting a Remote Laboratory to mobile devices, as well as the experience of a real Remote Laboratory, WebLab-Deusto, in this adaptation.

Towards federated interoperable bridges for sharing educational remote laboratories

Educational remote laboratories are software and hardware tools that allow students to remotely access real equipment located in the university as if they were in a hands-on-lab session. Different initiatives have existed during the last two decades, and indeed toolkits (e.g. iLabs, WebLab-Deusto or Labshare Sahara) have been developed to ease their development by providing common management features (e.g. authentication or scheduling). Each of these systems was developed aiming particular constraints, so it could be difficult to migrate the labs built on top of one system to other. While there is certainly some overlap among these systems, with bridges among them they become complimentary. Given that these systems support web services based federation protocols for sharing labs, it is possible to achieve this goal, and share labs among different universities through different systems. The impact of this goal is that different institutions can increase the experiential activities of their students, potentially improving their learning goals. The focus is the integration of WebLab-Deusto labs inside the iLab Shared Architecture, as well as the integration of iLab batch labs inside WebLab-Deusto, detailing limitations and advantages of both integrations and showing particular cases.

Generic integration of remote laboratories in learning and content management systems through federation protocols

Educational remote laboratories are a software and hardware tool that allows students to remotely access real equipment located in universities as if they were in a hands-on-lab session. Their integration in Content and Learning Management Systems (CMSs or LMSs) has been an active research topic for years, supporting mainly ad hoc solutions. A notable exception has been the use of federation protocols -commonly used for sharing laboratories from one university to other-, for actually sharing laboratories from a remote laboratory system to a C/LMS. This approach opened new doors in the simplification of the process, since it did not require the remote laboratories to make any type of change. The focus of this contribution is to provide a solution to decrease the number of functionalities required for creating an integration by providing a software component that reuses them. As shown in the contribution, this component has been implemented and two remote laboratory management systems (which provide access to multiple remote laboratories) are already supported, and a third one is under development. In the C/LMS side, all the LMSs supporting IMS LTI are supported, and HTTP APIs are provided for being supported by other systems. Indeed, the contribution describes its support in the Joomla CMS and in the Moodle 1.9 and dotLRN LMSs which do not support IMS LTI. The solution, called gateway4labs, is an open source initiative which targets to be used in production.

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.

Acceptance, Usability and Usefulness of WebLab-Deusto from the Students Point of View

In the engineering curriculum, remote labs are becoming a popular learning tool. The advantages of these laboratories and the different deployments have been analyzed many times, but in this paper we want to show the results of the evaluation of WebLab-Deusto as a learning tool. This work is focused on the subjects programmable logic (PL) in the third year of Automation and Electronics Engineering and in Electronics Design (ED) of the fifth year of the same degree. The paper presents the results of the surveys done by students since 2004. This survey consists of fifteen questions and its main objective is to measure the acceptance, usability and usefulness of the remote laboratory developed at University of Deusto.

SecondLab: A remote laboratory under Second Life

The present work describes the implementation of a new remote lab, SecondLab, that allows students to control a microbot from Second Life. SecondLab works over WebLab-Deusto, the remote lab of the University of Deusto, giving the students the chance to work with real experiments from a social 3D-based immersive environment. This approach places the remote lab closer to the students, trying this way to increase their motivation to study science and engineering.