Unai Hernandez

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.

VISIR deployment in undergraduate engineering practices

Practical sessions are the backbone of qualification in engineering education. It leads to a better understanding and allows mastering scientific concepts and theories. The lack of the availability of practical sessions at many universities and institutions owing to the cost and the unavailability of instructors the most of the time caused a significant decline in experimentation in engineering education over the last decades. Recently, with the progress of computer-based learning, remote laboratories have been proven to be the best alternative to the traditional ones, regarding to its low cost and ubiquity. Some universities have already started to deploy remote labs in their practical sessions. This contribution compiles diverse experiences based on the deployment of the remote laboratory, Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality (VISIR), on the practices of undergraduate engineering grades at various universities within the VISIR community. It aims to show the impact of its usage on engineering education concerning the assessments of students and teachers as well.

Using remote labs to serve different teacher's needs A case study with VISIR and RemotElectLab

Remote Laboratories are an emergent technological and pedagogical tool at all education levels, and their widespread use is an important part of their own improvement and evolution. This paper describes several issues encountered on laboratorial classes, on higher education courses, when using remote laboratories based on PXI systems, either using the VISIR system or an alternate in-house solution. Three main issues are presented and explained, all reported by teachers that gave support to students use of remote laboratories. The first issue deals with the need to allow students to select the actual place where an ammeter is to be inserted on electric circuits, even incorrectly, therefore emulating real world difficulties. The second one deals with problems with timing when several measurements are required at short intervals, as in the discharge cycle of a capacitor. And the last issue deals with the use of a multimeter in DC mode when reading AC values, a use that collides with the lab settings. All scenarios are presented and discussed including the solution found for each case. The conclusion derived from the described work is that the remote laboratories area is an expanding field, where practical use leads to improvement and evolution of the available solutions, requiring a strict cooperation and information sharing between all actors, i.e. developers, teachers and students.

Vehicle on board platform: Communications test and prototyping

This paper describes the process of prototyping and testing an in-vehicle embedded system which allows the driver to communicate with his vehicle, with the gadgets inside it (PDAs, cellular, sensor networks, and so on) and with the road infrastructure in order to consume intelligent transport services. The result of the presented work is an on board prototype and two services which have been developed to validate some characteristics of this embedded prototype.

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.

LabsLand: A sharing economy platform to promote educational remote laboratories maintainability, sustainability and adoption

A remote laboratory is a software and hardware tool that enables students to access real equipment located somewhere else through the Internet. The laboratories are typically deployed in universities or research centers. A key factor of remote laboratories is that once they are available through the Internet their usage can be scaled up and used by students of other institutions. Thus, two or more institutions can share different equipment to reduce costs. Furthermore, this enables a sharing economy where multiple providers provide access to their laboratories to each other, freely or not. However, while the number of remote laboratory initiatives is high, the overall impact of these laboratories is fairly limited beyond the scope of the host institution or the scope (and duration) of projects in which the host institution is involved. The focus of this contribution is to outline a novel initiative addressing this scaling problem. After over 10 years working on the area our research group has started a spin-off focused on this topic, called LabsLand. A key factor of this spin-off is to provide a platform similar to other sharing economy marketplaces, aiming to provide features commonly ignored in the remote laboratories literature such as trust, accurate reliability or different pricing schemes for different scenarios.

Towards a microRLMS approach for shared development of remote laboratories

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. They have been used for almost two decades. And most remote labs use at least a subset of the following features: authentication (verifying who is the user), authorization (granting permissions to laboatories), scheduling (usually a queue or a calendar), user tracking (registering students activities), federation or administrative tools. Systems that provided these features in a unified approach arose, called Remote Laboratory Management Systems (RLMSs). RLMS provide toolkits for making the development of remote labs easier: a remote lab developer uses one of these toolkits and all the features are automatically inherited. Furthermore, new versions of the same RLMS will provide new features. However, sometimes these RLMS do not allow remote lab developers to consume only certain features, implementing the rest themselves. This is a problem when integrating external laboratories, and increments the learning curve. The focus of this contribution is to describe a lighter approach based on multiple coupled small optional services called microRLMS.

Towards an extensible weblab architecture

Remote Laboratories have traditionally been focused on specific solutions for specific problems. We can find a wide range of Remote Laboratories in the literature, assisting different types of subjects but commonly bound to a restricted set of requirements. Due to this, little attention has been paid on working on a maintainable, scalable, secure architecture that addresses the requirements of a wider set of experiments, and that could be open enough to support or adopt new experiments, developed using different technologies in both client and server side. In this paper, we describe several aspects that might be taken into account when designing Remote Laboratories, describing the XWL Architecture and comparing it with other existing architectures.