Luis de la Torre

Virtual and remote labs in education

Laboratory experimentation plays an essential role in engineering and scientific education. Virtual and remote labs reduce the costs associated with conventional hands-on labs due to their required equipment, space, and maintenance staff. Furthermore, they provide additional benefits such as supporting distance learning, improving lab accessibility to handicapped people, and increasing safety for dangerous experimentation. This paper analyzes the literature on virtual and remote labs from its beginnings to 2015, identifying the most influential publications, the most researched topics, and how the interest in those topics has evolved along the way. To do so, bibliographical data gathered from ISI Web of Science, Scopus and GRC2014 have been examined using two prominent bibliometric approaches: science mapping and performance analysis. Display Omitted Laboratory experimentation plays an essential role in engineering and sci-entific education.Virtual and remote labs are emerging as a valuable alternative to conven-tional hands-on labs.This paper analyzes the literature on virtual and remote labs from 1993 to 2015.4405 records retrieved from ISI Web of Science, Scopus and GRC2014 are processed.Two bibliometric approaches are applied: performance analysis and science mapping.

Providing Collaborative Support to Virtual and Remote Laboratories

Virtual and remote laboratories (VRLs) are e-learning resources that enhance the accessibility of experimental setups providing a distance teaching framework which meets the students hands-on learning needs. In addition, online collaborative communication represents a practical and a constructivist method to transmit the knowledge and experience from the teacher to students, overcoming physical distance and isolation. This paper describes the extension of two open source tools: (1) the learning management system Moodle, and (2) the tool to create VRLs Easy Java Simulations (EJS). Our extension provides: (1) synchronous collaborative support to any VRL developed with EJS (i.e., any existing VRL written in EJS can be automatically converted into a collaborative lab with no cost), and (2) support to deploy synchronous collaborative VRLs into Moodle. Using our approach students and/or teachers can invite other users enrolled in a Moodle course to a real-time collaborative experimental session, sharing and/or supervising experiences at the same time they practice and explore experiments using VRLs.

The Ball and Beam System: A Case Study of Virtual and Remote Lab Enhancement With Moodle

Web-based labs are key tools for distance education that help to illustrate scientific phenomena, which require costly or difficult-to-assemble equipment. Easy Java Simulations (EJS) is an authoring tool that speeds up the creation of these kind of labs. An excellent proof of the EJS potential is the open source physics (OSP) repository, which hosts hundreds of free EJS labs. Learning management systems, such as Moodle, provide social contexts where students interact with each other. The work described in this paper looks for the synergy of both tools, EJS and Moodle, by supporting the deployment of EJS labs into Moodle and thus enriching them with social features (e.g., chat, forums, and videoconference). To test this approach, the authors have created the ball and beam lab, which helps students of automatic control engineering to train different advanced techniques (robust, fuzzy, and reset control), and compare their performance in relation to a conventional proportional-integral-derivative control.

Virtual and remote labs in control education: A survey

Abstract Virtual and remote labs have been around for almost twenty years and while they have been constantly gaining popularity since their appearance, there are still many people in the control education community who either do not know many details about them or do not know them at all. What are their benefits? Which examples of virtual and remote labs for control education can be found in the Internet and how spread and popular are they? What are the current trends and issues in the implementation and deployment of these tools? And the future ones? These and others are some of the questions we answer in this paper, trying to bring the attention of the control education community to these tools which, we believe, are meant to have an increasing importance and relevance for the 21st century students.

What remote labs can do for you

Internet technologies are helping physics teachers provide their students with more lab time and expose them to a wider variety of experiments.

Making EJS applications at the OSP digital library available from Moodle

Easy Java Simulations (EJS) is a free and open source software that allows to easily create simulations or virtual labs of very different topics such as control engineering, physics and so on. The Open Source Physics (OSP) project holds the ComPADRE library, a digital repository that offers more than 500 EJS applications, created by the community, that are accessible for free. Moodle is a free and open source software, well-known for being the most used and spread Learning Management System (LMS) all over the world. This work presents a new plugin for Moodle that allows searching, downloading, and adding to a Moodle course, EJS applications from the OSP ComPADRE library.

Adding automatic evaluation to interactive virtual labs

Automatic evaluation is a challenging field that has been addressed by the academic community in order to reduce the assessment workload. In this work we present a new element for the authoring tool Easy Java Simulations (EJS). This element, which is named automatic evaluation element (AEE), provides automatic evaluation to virtual and remote laboratories built with EJS by using the server application Goodle grading management system (GMS). The integration of both tools entitles a professor to create interactive virtual and remote laboratories and automatically evaluate the work of their students. As a test bed two case studies are presented; a non-linear controller design virtual laboratory used in an advanced control master course and a servomechanism virtual laboratory used in an undergraduate basic control course.

A Virtual and Remote Control Laboratory in Moodle: The Ball and Beam System

Abstract This paper presents a web-based control laboratory for a ball and beam system that was adapted to be used within an online course of a Learning Management System platform. The experimentation web environment is presented in the context of the UNEDLabs project, a Spanish network of web-based laboratories for science and engineering education. LabView and data acquisition boards are used in the server-side for the remote laboratory application, Easy Java Simulations for the client-side interface of both the virtual and the remote laboratory, and Moodle for the web environment. The integration between the virtual and remote labs and Moodle is achieved thanks to the use of the EJSApp plugins. Recipients of the resulting application are graduate students who can use the advanced control techniques implemented in this web-lab: robust, fuzzy, and reset control.

Exemplar driven development of software product lines

The benefits of following a product line approach to develop similar software systems are well documented. Nevertheless, some case studies have revealed significant barriers to adopt such approach. In order to minimize the paradigm shift between conventional software engineering and software product line engineering, this paper presents a new development process where the products of a domain are made by analogy to an existing product. Furthermore, this paper discusses the capabilities and limitations of different techniques to implement the analogy relation and proposes a new language to overcome such limitations.

Automated experiments on EjsS laboratories

Experimentation in laboratories is a key pillar in the education of graduate and undergraduate students, who need to understand the fundamental concepts from both perspectives: theoretical and practical. High costs associated with equipment, space, and maintenance staff, impose certain constraints on resources for traditional laboratories. While, Virtual and Remote Laboratories can overcome these limitations, they present important limitations in their use. Some actions are repetitive in nature, cannot be executed trivially or in reasonable time by a user. Some others might be simply impossible without computer help. For example, doing a linear regression of values obtained in an experiment, performing a comparison of results obtained by making a sweep in the values of a particular variable or taking a system to an initial state. Hence, it arises the need of encoding some experimental tasks to automatize their execution. With other existing applications, to encode experiments, users need to know how VRLs are implemented. In addition, they have to manage the language in which the simulation was created so they need to handle fluently a simulation language just to perform experiments. The authors propose a tool called the Experiment Editor, to undertake automated experiments for VRLs. The Experiment Editor enables the user to encode experiments regardless of the language in which the laboratory was implemented. To do so, it provides a powerful and easy-to-learn language, and the corresponding interpreter that supports the execution of the experiments.