Luis Rodriguez-Gil

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.

Graphic technologies for virtual, remote and hybrid laboratories: WebLab-FPGA hybrid lab

Nowadays virtual, remote and hybrid (with both virtual and real remote components) laboratories depend on a large stack of technologies, and are almost always web-based. However, still today those laboratories which require relatively advanced graphics (3D or even 2D graphics) often rely on non-standard components and browser plugins, such as Adobe Flash or Java Applets. These components were necessary because of the severe limitations that standard Web technologies have traditionally had in regard to graphics and RIAs (Rich Internet Applications). This paper analyzes two of the most common non-standard technologies that are still used today in remote laboratories. It also proposes two alternatives which make use of modern Web technologies (Canvas and WebGL). Additionally, it illustrates one of the proposed alternatives (WebGL) with an example: Weblab-FPGA-Watertank, a hybrid laboratory implemented at the University of Deusto under the Weblab-Deusto RLMS (Remote Laboratory Management System), which lets users program a real FPGA device remotely to control a virtual environment. Users require only an up-to-date browser and require no plugins whatsoever. The fully-featured virtual environment is rendered through WebGL. Finally, conclusions are drawn from the analysis and from the WebLab-FPGA-Watertank experience.

Sharing the remote laboratories among different institutions: A practical case

The interest on educational remote laboratories has increased, as have the technologies involved in their development and deployment. These laboratories enable students to use real equipment located in the university from the Internet. This way, students can extend their personal learning experience by testing with real equipment what they are studying at home, or performing hands-on-lab sessions at night, on weekends or whenever the traditional laboratories are physically closed. A unique feature of remote laboratories when compared to traditional laboratories is that the distance of the student is not an issue, so remote laboratories can be shared with other schools or universities. In this contribution, authors present and discuss a widely spread remote laboratory (VISIR, present in 6 european universities + 1 in India) shared among 3 institutions (2 universities + 1 high school). During the exhibition, demonstration of the laboratories being shared will be shown.

An Extensible Architecture for the Integration of Remote and Virtual Laboratories in Public Learning Tools

Remote laboratories are software and hardware tools that allow students to remotely access real equipment located in universities. The integration of remote laboratories in learning tools (learning management systems, content management systems, or personal learning environments) has been achieved to integrate remote laboratories as part of the learning curricula. A cross-institutional initiative called gateway4labs has been created to perform this integration extensible to multiple remote laboratories in multiple learning tools. This contribution focuses on describing this initiative and, in particular, how opening it to public systems (where users do not need to be registered) produces new technical and organizational challenges due to the public availability of labs. In addition, this contribution shows integrations of systems that were not previously addressed in this initiative, such as PhET or ViSH, as well as a new approach for integrating supported laboratories in external specifications such as the smart device one through OpenSocial.

Generic integration of remote laboratories in public learning tools: Organizational and technical challenges

Educational remote laboratories are software and hardware tools that allow students to remotely access real equipment located in universities as if they were in a hands-on-lab session. Federations of these remote laboratories have existed for years, focused on allowing two universities to share their equipment. Additionally, the integration of remote laboratories in Learning Tools-LT-(Learning Management Systems, Content Management Systems or Personal Learning Environments) has been achieved in the past in order to integrate remote laboratories as part of the learning curricula, being part of the practice exercises or even as a tool of evaluation. An cross-institutional initiative called gateway4labs has been created to perform this integration through federation protocols. In this contribution, this initiative adds support for OpenSocial as a new protocol for Learning Tools (in particular, for EPFL Graasp), as well as for the iLab Shared Architecture (in addition to WebLab-Deusto and UNR FCEIA laboratories already supported). Supporting OpenSocial opens a number of new technical and organizational challenges since public labs should be supported without registering students, teachers or schools. The focus of this contribution is to show these challenges and how they are tackled in the proposed open source implementation.

Exploring students collaboration in remote laboratory infrastructures

Educational remote laboratories are a software and hardware tool that allows students to remotely access real equipment located in the university as if they were in a hands-on-lab session. Since the equipment used by students is real, it has associated costs: laboratory development, hardware used and maintenance costs. Given the remote nature of the remote laboratories, institutions can share these costs by sharing the access to the laboratories. In order to reduce the associated development and maintenance costs, as well as to reduce the overall costs by managing the sharing of laboratories in different institutions, software infrastructures and toolkits have arisen, such as the MIT iLab project, the Labshare Sahara project, or WebLab-Deusto. However, a particular feature seamlessly present on hands-on-lab sessions but not often present in remote laboratories sessions is direct collaboration among students. While collaboration at a particular laboratory level is generally supported -or can easily be implemented-, some features of remote laboratory management systems such as load balancing or federation might enter in conflict with collaboration. This paper is focused on discussing levels of adoption of collaboration in these remote laboratory management systems.

Towards New Multiplatform Hybrid Online Laboratory Models

Online laboratories have traditionally been split between virtual labs, with simulated components; and remote labs, with real components. The former tend to provide less realism but to be easily scalable and less expensive to maintain, while the latter are fully real but tend to require a higher maintenance effort and be more error-prone. This technical paper describes an architecture for hybrid labs merging the two approaches, in which virtual and real components interact with each other. The goal is to leverage the advantages of each type of lab. The architecture is fully web-based and multiplatform, which is in line with the industry and the remote laboratory community trends. Only recently has this become technically feasible for graphic-intensive laboratories due to previous limitations in browser-based graphical technologies. This architecture relies on the recent HTML5 and WebGL standards to overcome these limitations, and makes use of the Unity technology. To ensure that the proposed architecture is suitable, we set requirements based on the literature, we compare it with other approaches, and we examine its scope, strengths, and weaknesses. Additionally, we illustrate it with a concrete hybrid lab and we evaluate its benefits and potential through educational experiments.

Advanced integration of OpenLabs VISIR (Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality) with Weblab-Deusto

During the last years, VISIR (Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality) has proved itself a useful tool for electronics remote experimentation, having been deployed in several different universities. As a domain-specific remote laboratory, VISIR offers those features which are required for its stand-alone usage, such as authentication, scheduling, user management, etc. Though for certain purposes this may be adequate, often it is more appropriate to offer VISIR as one kind of experiment among many, under a generic remote laboratories framework, such as WebLab-Deusto, MIT iLabs or Labshare Sahara. These frameworks provide integrated access to several different kinds of experiments, such as electronics, robotics, etc. Through this integration, a smooth experience can be provided to the user, and VISIR can benefit from all the functionality that the generic framework provides (common authentication, load-balancing, scheduling, etc). Efforts are currently being made to integrate VISIR with various laboratories. In this paper, we describe what the integration of VISIR with Weblab-Deusto involves; how certain VISIR-specific functionalities that depended on its original framework were handled, and how through Weblab-Deusto VISIR can easily gain certain new features. Some of those are the integration with different environments such as Facebook, or with Learning Management Systems such as Moodle. Another feature is collaboration among VISIR users, which makes it possible to share a VISIR circuit in real time. Furthermore, through this association VISIR gains new possibilities, such as federation.

Classifying online laboratories: Reality, simulation, user perception and potential overlaps

Students of technological fields must practice so as to properly learn a particular field. There are different ways to practice: hands-on-lab in a real environment or a mockup, datasets (and tools for analyzing these datasets), or simulations. Each solution provides different advantages and disadvantages. For example, students might not prefer simulations since they do not always provide accurate real values (and when testing in a real laboratory results differ and the engagement might be higher), but they might be more affordable than real laboratories (depending on the field, there might not be any other affordable solution than a simulation). Datasets of recorded measurements are an equidistant point, where costs are lower and data is real, but no interaction is performed by the users with the reality. When creating remote laboratories, a system that enables students access the final equipment is usually used, but this might not be the best option. Sometimes, every potential input could be recorded and used in the future as a dataset to let users access this laboratory in a scalable way, and hybrid solutions could also be achieved. The focus of this contribution is to classify online laboratories from this perspective.

A new approach to conduct remote experimentation over embedded technologies

Present paper presents a new approach to the deployment of remote laboratories over embedded technologies. New proposed architecture allows to perform the main stages in the experimentation with embedded systems including compilation and debugging. The design of the architecture provides scalability and replicability over different technologies. A new remote laboratory has been deployed to test the architecture providing remote experimentation over an ARM Cortex M0+ MCU.