Lab Description Language — A framework approach for describing and mediating remote and virtual labs

Abstract

More and more universities and schools across the world are developing different types of remote labs for their own operations. However, there is very little evidence at the present time that such local labs are used by or shared with other institutions in order to provide educational support for a wider range of students on a regular basis. Several other virtual and remote laboratories have been developed for a variety of disciplines. But these diverse proprietary interfaces, software components and implementations for each experiment are a problem for learners and teachers (no common user interfaces and APIs are used). Therefore, it is hard to integrate new remote labs or create virtual labs for non-engineers. Due to incompatible software implementations it is also a challenging task to integrate external labs into an existing lab platform. That complicates the sharing of labs between different organizations and universities. With the approach of "Lab Description Language" (LDL) authors of this paper are introducing a new framework concept for describing and mediating remote and virtual labs. This concept is demonstrated using the example of the Virtual Micro Controller Unit (VMCU) developed by paper authors.