Philip H. Bailey

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.

Collaborative virtual 3D environment for internet-accessible physics experiments

Abstractâ??Immersive 3D worlds have increasingly raised the interest of researchers and practitioners for various learning and training settings over the last decade. These virtual worlds can provide multiple communication channels between users and improve presence and awareness in the learning process. Consequently virtual 3D environments facilitate collaborative learning and training scenarios. In this paper we focus on the integration of internet-accessible physics experiments (iLabs) combined with the TEALsim 3D simulation toolkit in Project Wonderland, Suns toolkit for creating collaborative 3D virtual worlds. Within such a collaborative environment these tools provide the opportunity for teachers and students to work together as avatars as they control actual equipment, visualize physical phenomenon generated by the experiment, and discuss the results. In particular we will outline the steps of integration, future goals, as well as the value of a collaboration space in Wonderlands virtual world.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dynamic virtual environment for multiple physics experiments in higher education

The transportation of a campus classroom and/or laboratory into a three dimensional virtual representation has changed remote learning, specially in engineering education. Our first collaborative virtual environment, a proof of concept, provides full functionality of one physics experiment, though there are still some performance issues to be resolved. The next step for integrating TEALsim and iLabs in Suns Project Wonderland is porting our system from Wonderlands version 0.4 to 0.5. Our goal is a system redesign in order to support adding flexibility to multiple physics simulations. The performance improvements in Wonderland 0.5 will allow a large number of avatars in our future scenario, where they will be able to run even more physics experiments, through a new 3D user interface.

Design and Evaluation of a Learner-Centric Immersive Virtual Learning Environment for Physics Education

There is a growing interest in virtual immersive environments such as virtual worlds for gaming, socialization, and also learning purpose. Frequently three major issues are mentioned, when using 3D worlds for educational scenarios: high technical requirements, low user acceptance and missing technical know-how. The last two issues can be decreased using an elaborate user-centric design with focus on the pedagogical objectives to improve the user experience and enhance the usability. This paper discusses design principles for immersive, three-dimensional environments and in-world tools with focus on pedagogical aspects and presents based on these principles an implementation of a virtual world environment for physics education which integrates the pedagogical model TEAL. A first showcase was built in Open Wonderland and evaluated and tested by student groups and domain experts with focus on usability and pedagogical ambitions. The evaluation shows how the implementation of a learning-centric model focusing on the pedagogical main objectives and designed in-line with the usability guidelines can minimize issues such as user acceptance and missing technical know-how.