Abstract
Development of remote laboratories in academic settings has been held back because of the lack of standardization of technology, processes, operation and their integration with formal educational environments. Remote laboratories are used in educational settings for a variety of reasons, for instance, when the equipment is not available in the physical laboratory; when the physical laboratory space available is not sufficient to, either, set up the experiments or permit access to all on-site students in the course; or when the teacher needs to provide online laboratory experiences to students taking courses via distance education. Centers have been forming platforms that grant remote access to a collection of physical experiments that provide alternatives to educational institutions to reduce budgets of not only equipment purchases but also other expenses, such as, people, space, maintenance, and electricity consumption. This paper offers a taxonomy and examples of types of laboratories and hybrid combinations, and proposes Unified Modeling Language (UML) models for remote laboratories incorporating access models for collaborative user roles in the educational context that support synchronous and asynchronous formats in learning environments. The need for development of adaptive interfaces for remote laboratories based on difficulty level and demonstrated user knowledge is presented. Finally, the paper proposes a scheme of virtualization of the infrastructure and an adaptive scheme of assisted remote laboratories where part of the experience is carried out by the user (student) and part is assisted by the system (teacher avatar) that is able to act as a team mate for the students during the experimentation process.
Highlights
Remote laboratories have been under development for more than 15 years
This section develops a model of the typical architecture of distributed remote laboratories based on the work of Tawfik, Salzmann, Gillet and Lowe who proposed delivering remote labs using the Laboratory as a Service (LaaS) approach [16]
A second approach recalls the concept of operating systems virtualization [30] which allows the system hardware to run multiple instances of different operating systems concurrently. This concept can be applied to remote laboratories virtualizing the control unit as an instance of a larger infrastructure that can provide an equivalent computational power and the memory required to run the experiment. This approach generates additional challenges, such as: the emulation of the specific architecture of the control unit, e.g. Programmable Logic Controller (PLC), Microprocessor, Peripheral Interface Controller (PIC), and Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA); and the management of the available resources that can be assigned to a user in time windows
Summary
Remote laboratories have been under development for more than 15 years. In 2002 Hamza, et al [1] evaluated alternatives to physical laboratories used in engineering education, including simulation and remote laboratories. Providing Laboratory as a Service (LaaS) [4, 5] has been proposed for companies, research and laboratories centers to develop and implement modular remote laboratories to the demands of the user. Due to the need for integration, contextualization and interoperability, the IEEE Education Society has formed the IEEE-SA P1876 TM Working Group (Standard on Networked Smart Learning Objects for Online Laboratories) [6] to develop the standard that will define the architectures and implementation processes. The sections present terminology and concepts, propose UML models for laboratory taxonomy, for remote laboratory, and for user collaboration roles possible in remote laboratories to facilitate understanding uses and configurations the standard needs to support and to document a reference for developers and users in the academic context.
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