Rosario Gil

New technology trends in education: Seven years of forecasts and convergence

Each year since 2004, a new Horizon Report has been released. Each edition attempts to forecast the most promising technologies likely to impact on education along three horizons: the short term (the year of the report), the mid-term (the next 2 years) and the long term (the next 4 years). This paper analyzes the evolution of technology trends from 2004 to 2014 that correspond to the long-term predictions of the most recent Horizon Report. The study analyzes through bibliometric analysis which technologies were successful and became a regular part of education systems, which ones failed to have the predicted impact and why, and the shape of technology flows in recent years. The study also shows how the evolution and maturity of some technologies allowed the revival of expectations for others. The analysis here, which focuses on educational applications, offers guidelines that may be helpful to those seeking to invest in new research areas.

Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality (VISIR) for Remote Wiring and Measurement of Electronic Circuits on Breadboard

This paper reports on a state-of-the-art remote laboratory project called Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality (VISIR). VISIR allows wiring and measuring of electronic circuits remotely on a virtual workbench that replicates physical circuit breadboards. The wiring mechanism is developed by means of a relay switching matrix connected to a PCI eXtensions for Instrumentation (PXI) instrumentation platform. The entire equipment is controlled by LabVIEW server software, in addition to a measurement server software that protects the equipment from hazard connections by verifying input circuit designs, sent by students, before being executed. This paper addresses other approaches such as remote labs based on Data Acquisition Cards (DAQs), NetLab, and RemotElectLab, comparing them with VISIR in order to emphasize its singularity. Topics discussed are as follows: the technical description, software, operation cycle, features, and provided services. In addition, the feedback received by students at several universities and the encountered drawbacks along with the proposed solutions are highlighted. The paper finally addresses the ongoing and future challenges within the VISIR community including its integration with Learning Management Systems (LMSs) and iLab Shared Architecture (ISA), its new hardware version release that is based on LAN eXtensions for Instrumentation (LXI), and its new open platform version that supports federated access.

Remote labs as learning services in the educational arena

Technology-enhanced learning is not just interacting with learning objects. Physical labs are another useful resource in education, especially for engineering and science education. They are confined to the physical location they are bound to. It is obviously interesting for any learning process to be able to open up this access from remote locations in the same effective way as learning objects are accessed through a Learning Management System, taking advantage of the provided services, such as authentication, group building, etc.

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.

Virtual and Remote Industrial Laboratory: Integration in Learning Management Systems

During the last few decades, many industrial remote and virtual laboratories have been designed and implemented at different universities and schools with the goal of providing online experiments that are remotely available to their students from anywhere and at any time. Research into virtual and remote laboratories has shown that the vast majority of these laboratories are built using learning tools and resources that are suited to a specific institution. Thus, different universities implement the software for their particular needs and consume a significant amount of time and energy in the process. This article describes a different approach: the design and implementation of a learning management system (LMS) activity that allows sharing of electronic, control and automation, and electrical remote laboratories from different universities within industrial courses without requiring the teacher to program a single line of code.

Middleware for the Development of Context-Aware Applications inside m-Learning: Connecting e-Learning to the Mobile World

This paper addresses the issue of the creation of context-aware applications inside the Mobile-Learning approach. It tries to clarify aspects like the most suitable environments of application; how new features of mobile devices, such as GPS (Global Positioning System) receivers, motion sensors, etc., must be taken into account. It also addresses why most of the m-Learning applications do not make use of the existing services and knowledge of the Learning Management Systems, which are in fact the real pillars of the e-learning methodology. Finally, the architectural design of a context-aware framework created by the authors is described. The main contribution of this framework is to provide contextual information from different sources, including different kind of geographical sensors (allowing roaming among them) and external services. As result of the work, the middleware has been developed and it is being used in the development of several m-learning projects.

Shareable educational architectures for remote laboratories

The proliferation of remote laboratories in multiple disciplines of science has removed the cost and administration burdens that hinder the adoption of practical sessions in engineering education. Remote laboratories provide online workbenches unconstrained by neither temporal nor geographical considerations and allow an interactive learning that maintains student attention. Recently, remote laboratories have been developed at multiple universities and adopted in engineering education. Furthermore, some of these laboratories are replicated at many universities such as the electronic circuits remote labs: NetLab, VISIR, and labs based on NI ELVIS II. This was the commence of a new mainstream which advocates a better remodeling of those laboratories to allow their allocation, sharing among universities, and their communication with other heterogeneous systems, e.g., Learning Management Systems (LMS). In this context, numerous sharable educational architectures for remote labs integration have emerged such as LiLa, Lab2go, ISILab, DCL, WebLab Deusto, iLab (ISA), and Labshare (Sahara). This paper reports on the emerging solutions for remote laboratories implementation and deployment in engineering education in an efficient way. The paper discusses different integration scenarios pointing out features, limitations, and upcoming challenges.

A Context-Aware Application Based on Ubiquitous Location

Location tracking systems are becoming more relevant in many new environments, due to the fact they are the core of context aware applications. This new concept can improve the way organizations provide services and do business. Inside university area, users location (both students, teachers and staff) gives rise to a new kind of services based on their profile and on the area in which the user is in each moment, allowing a personalization of the offered contents. The present paper shows how context-aware applications based on location technologies can be developed thanks to a homogenizer middleware that offers contextual information from the different location methods, such as GPS, Wi-Fi and RFID.

On the design of remote laboratories

This paper presents a thorough study on the available lab server software technologies for the design of remote laboratories. The paper focuses on the common outstanding technologies applied for this purpose such as LabVIEW and MATLAB. The paper addresses as well on other solutions such as high-level programming languages, e.g., C/C++ and .NET languages, pointing out the advantages, limitations, and applications of each. This is in order to ease the selection of the appropriate software when designing a remote lab. Furthermore, the paper points out applications in which various technologies are adopted in order to make use of the exclusive features of each. The study is preceded by a brief overview on the main hardware and software components in the construction of todays remote laboratory for engineering practice to emphasize the role of the controller server in the lab operation.

Integration of Internet Based Labs and Open Source LMS

Nowadays there are a great number of universities and organizations working on developing virtual labs. These virtual labs allow students to carry out their experiments and acquire practical knowledge. At the same time these universities are using one or several learning management systems that allow professors to display and organize theoretical content. A good solution is the integration of learning management system and virtual labs. That is what we are going to describe in this paper. We are working on a middleware that allows using the LMSs services together with the virtual labs.