Pablo Orduña

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.

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.

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.

Easily Integrable platform for the deployment of a Remote Laboratory for microcontrollers

Remote laboratories are the natural solution in order to perform real experimentation under e-learning tools. Nevertheless these tools are the result of the research developed by the universities to cover their own needs without having in consideration the deployment of this technology by other institutions. This paper presents a hw prototype for a Remote Lab for microcontrollers that tries to solve these problems contributing new possibilities from the commercial and professional point of view.

Otsopack: Lightweight semantic framework for interoperable ambient intelligence applications

In Ambient Intelligence environments machines proactively and transparently work on behalf of humans. The nature of these machines and the communication protocols they use is multifarious. Therefore, the applications running on top of them remarkably demand interoperability. The Triple Space Computing (TSC) paradigm addresses that problem by sharing information represented in a semantic format through a common virtual space. As long as application developers use standard ontologies, different applications using the same spaces will interact automatically. The focus of this paper is to present Otsopack, a fully distributed TSC middleware designed to meet the needs of mobile and resource constrained devices. Otsopack defines a simple HTTP interface for the TSC operations. This interface focuses on simplicity and modularity, so that two implementations that support different modules can still interact. To assess the middleware we provide time and load measurements, and we analyze two independent implementations.