Modelling remote laboratories integrations in e-learning tools through remote laboratories federation protocols

Abstract

An educational remote laboratory is a software and hardware tool that allows students to remotely access real equipment located in the university as if they were in a hands-on-lab session. Federations of remote laboratories have existed for years: they are based on enabling two universities to exchange remote laboratories directly, without registering students of the latter on the former university. Integration of remote laboratories on Learning Management Systems (LMS) or Content Management Systems (CMS) have also been addressed in the past, enabling institutions to delegate the authentication or authorization of the experiments to the LMS/CMS. However, these integrations are usually achieved in an ad hoc way, integrating each particular laboratory to a LMS/CMS. This contribution studies the use of federation models to integrate remote laboratory management systems in LMS/CMSs, since both approaches (integrating a laboratory on an a external electronic learning tool, and integrating a laboratory on other laboratory) are essentially equivalent. The contribution defines two case studies to evaluate this approach, showing how this integration is achieved on a LMS (Moodle) and on a CMS (Joomla).