Wissam Halimi

The Smart Device specification for remote labs

This paper presents the Smart Device specification to interface with remote labs. To encourage the broader sharing of remote labs, the Smart Device paradigm decouples the client from the server and provides well-defined interfaces between client and server. Such Smart Device services are exposed on the Internet and enable interoperability with client applications, other Smart Devices and external services (e.g. a booking service). This papers presents the extensible and platform-agnostic specification of the Smart Device services and internal functionalities. The Smart Device specification contains sufficient service metadata to enable the automatic generation of basic client applications. The specification is illustrated through an example and first implementations of the specification are presented.

Deploying Large-Scale Online Labs with Smart Devices

Deploying remote laboratories at a very large scale is one of the upcoming challenges in remote experimentation. It is referred to as Massive Open Online Labs (MOOLs). Being able to sustain a massive number of users accessing a specific resource concurrently is a complex task. The challenge is to maximize the use of the shared resource (the online lab) while minimizing or even canceling the waiting time to access the online lab such that the user feels it is dedicated to him/her. Tackling this problem requires revisiting both the pedagogical and the technical methodologies of online lab implementation, sharing, and deployment. In this chapter, we use indifferently online labs or remote labs to refer to physical labs accessible at distance through the Internet. A remote lab can also be considered as a cyber-physical system (CPS) as a combination of sensors, actuators, and embedded intelligence to fulfill given operational objectives.

Enabling the Automatic Generation of User Interfaces for Remote Laboratories

Remote laboratories are an important component of blended and distance science and engineering education. By definition, they provide access to a physical lab in a distant location. Many architectures enabling remote laboratory systems exist, the most common of which are Client-Server based. In this context, the Server interfaces the physical setup and makes it software-accessible. The Smart Device Specifications revisit a Client-Server architecture, with the main aim of cancelling the dependencies which inherently exist between a Client and a Server. This is done by describing the Server as a set of services, which are exposed as well-defined APIs. If a remote laboratory is built following the Smart Device Specifications, any person with programming skills can create a personalized client application to access the lab. But in practice, teachers rely on the mediated contact with a lab provider to have information about what kind of experiment(s) the lab in question implements. Even though there is a complete description of the available sensors and actuators making up a lab and how to be accessed, it is not clear how they are connected (relationships). In this sense, a list of sensors and actuators are not enough to make a guided selection of components to create the interface to an experiment. Therefore, the aim of this work is to support teachers in choosing the experiments and creating the respective UI on their own, in a pedagogically oriented scenario and by taking into consideration the target online learning environment. This is done by revisiting the Smart Device Specifications and extending them, in addition to proposing a tool that will automatically generate the user interface of the chosen experiment(s).

Standardization Layers for Remote Laboratories as Services and Open Educational Resources

Delivering education and educational resources has evolved from class-centered settings towards distributed, cloud-based models. This is mainly the consequence of publicly available educational resources such as documents, videos, and web applications. At the same time, emerging technologies in information and communication are enabling the development and deployment of remote laboratories on the Web. Today, these freely and openly available educational interactive media are known as Open Education Resources (OERs). Learning management systems, MOOC platforms, and educational social media platforms provide a medium for teachers to create their teaching activities around OERs in a structured way. To enjoy an effective and productive learning experience, it is necessary for the educational resources to be fully integrated in the hosting platform. While most platforms have a ready-to-embed infrastructure for certain types of OERs, they are not ready to host remote laboratories in an integrated fashion. In this paper, we define the necessary integration layers for remote labs in online learning environments. The work is validated by two implementations with different target platforms.

The Mach-Zehnder Interferometer — A smart remote experiment based on a software template

Hands-on laboratory sessions are one of the pillars of science and engineering education. It is reputed that institutions find it difficult to provide enough laboratory setups that cover all taught scientific topics due to logistical and budgetary limitations. With the recent advances in web technologies enabling real-time interaction, remotely accessing physical devices became possible, and so the rise of remote experimentation as a solution to the mentioned limitations. The development and deployment of remote laboratories is still a tedious process for lab providers, given the need to write new applications for each new lab. In this paper, we propose a software template for lab providers that will alleviate some of their concerns by following the Smart Device Paradigm and Specifications and abiding to software engineering rules to produce a reusable and flexible solution. We will show how this in-progress template can be used for implementing a remote Mach-Zehnder Interferometer.

Access to Massive Open Online Labs through a MOOC

Few MOOCs offer laboratory work as part of their educational material, yet it is known that hands-on sessions are important components of science and engineering education. Equally important is understanding how students are using labs as part of their learning activity outside the constraints of space and time. In this work we present the initial results of the usage of a remote lab provided as part of a Control Systems MOOC.

An Activity Tracking Infrastructure for Embedded Open Educational Labs Supporting the Needs of Lab Owners and Students

Remote labs are interactive Open Educational Resources, where user’s action generates a wealth of data belonging to two categories: interaction data resulting from the use of the client web app, and experimental data resulting from performing the experiment. Many entities are interested in deriving insights from the user’s generated data: students, teachers, institutions, and lab providers. In this work we consider to needs of students and lab owners as stakeholders. Through questionnaires we find out that students want to save and retrieve their experimental results and have awareness about their progress relative to others, while lab owners want to understand how their labs are used in order to provide better services and advertise their labs. Given that students and lab owners have different interests in the data, we address their differing needs by proposing an architecture for an activity tracking infrastructure, an accompanying vocabulary to formalize the tracks, and present a use case.

The smart wind turbine lab

Remote experimentation is at the core of Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics education supported by e-learning. The development and integration of remote laboratories in online learning activities is hindered by the inherited supporting infrastructures architecture and implementation. In this paper we present a remote experiment (The Smart Wind Turbine) built following the Smart Device Paradigm and integrated in an Inquiry Learning Space: the rich open educational resource defined in the EU project Go-Lab. Graasp-an educational social media platform, is the authoring and hosting tool. The Golabz platform is the dissemination medium among teachers and students.