Shareable Educational Architectures for Remote Laboratories

Mohamed Tawfik, Elio San Cristóbal, Alberto Pesquera, Rosario Gil, Sergio Martin, Gabriel Díaz, Juan Peire, Manuel Castro, Rafael Pastor, Salvador Ros, Roberto Hernández

Electrical & Computer Engineering DepartmentSpanish University for Distance Education (UNED)

The implementation of practical sessions in engineering education:

• Paves the way for students to be familiar with the instruments and thus, with the industrial real-world.

• Augment the learning outcomes by strengthening the understanding of scientific concepts and theories.

Remote laboratories facilitates the practical sessions availability providing on-line ubiquitous workbenches unconstrained by neither temporal nor geographical considerations.

Remote laboratories are those laboratories that can be controlled and administrated online. They differ from the virtual simulated laboratories as they are interacting with physical instruments.

The common generic architecture design of today’s remote laboratory for industrial electronics applications.

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 circuit’s 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).

I. Integration with Metadata Repository

II. Integration with Learning Management Systems (LMSs)

Students

Lab1

….

Lab2

LMS

Provided Services:· Administrative tools· Scheduling· Synchronous and asynchronous

communication tools· Assessment and tracking tools· Multimedia sharing tools· Standard compatibility

….

….

III. Integration with Remote Laboratory Management Systems (RLMSs)

USERS

RLMS

Lab ServersEquipments

…...

…...

Diferent Remote Lab Systems

· Common Access Portal· Management· Administrative Tools· Communication Tools· ..· Other

GOLC: Global Online Laboratory Consortium

• The GOLC consortium is focused on promoting the development and sharing of, and research into remotely accessible laboratories for educational use.

• The GOLC partners include most of the pioneers in remote laboratories development and deployment.

http://online-lab.org/

GOLC: Global Online Laboratory Consortium

• The trend in researching within GOLC is to create standard APIs that allows communication with different remote laboratory systems that adhere to this standard.

• For instance, users of Sahara could access experiments integrated in iLab and vice versa.

USER Lab ServerArchitecture

iLab (ISA)

LabShare (Sahara)

For more information about remote laboratories, we invite you to access to the web page of the Electrical & Computer Engineering department of the UNED.

http://ohm.ieec.uned.es/

Research on Technologies for Engineering Education

Thanks for your Attention!

Gabriel Diaz

Electrical & Computer Engineering Department (DIEEC)Spanish University for Distance Education (UNED)