Remote Laboratories have become part of current teaching and learning, particularly in engineering. Their potential to aid students beyond their hands-on lab classes has been a matter of discussion in literature. Teachers and researchers are aware that the thorough analysis of both strengths and shortcomings of remote labs in didactical implementations may not only lead to the improvement of these resources but also of the pedagogical implications in engineering classes. The present study was carried out in a Higher Education Institution in Brazil in two different courses during three consecutive semesters where a remote lab (VISIR) addressing electric and electronic topics was implemented, yielding 471 students' academic results and opinions. These students' results (while using VISIR) cross-analysed with the course characteristics, reveal some factors teachers may tackle to foster student learning and motivation. The conclusions point to the need for VISIR interface modernization and showed it is more useful in basic courses than in more advanced ones, when dealing with classic lab experiments. Results also show that teachers' involvement plus their ability to brief students on VISIR's usefulness have a significant influence not only on students' performance but also on their perception of learning and satisfaction with the tool. In the analysed cases, the students with more learning needs seemed to be the ones who could benefit more from VISIR.

The Vatican Library is an extraordinary repository of rare bool(S and manuscripts. Among its 150000 manuscripts are eariy copies of worl(s by Aristotie, Dante, Euciid, Homer, and Virgii. Yet today access to the Library is iimited. Because of the time and cost required to travel to Rome, oniy some 2000 scholars can afford to visit the Library each year. Through the Vatican Library Project, we are exploring the practicality of providing digital library services that extend access to portions of the Library's collections to scholars worldwide, as an early example of providing digital library services that extend and complement traditional library services. A core goal of the project is to provide access via the Internet to some of the Library's most valuable manuscripts, printed books, and other sources to a scholarly community around the world. A multinational, multidisciplinary team is addressing the technical challenges raised by that goal, including • Development of a multiserver system suitable for providing information to scholars worldwide. • Capture of images of the materials with faithful color and sufficient detail to support scholarly study. • Protection of the on-line materials, especially images, from misappropriation. • Development of tools to enable scholars to locate desired materials. • Development of tools to enable scholars to scrutinize images of manuscripts.In this paper, we provide an overview of the project, a description of the system being developed to satisfy its needs, and a discussion of how the technical challenges are being addressed.

Abstract-Experiments have been at the heart of scientific development and education for centuries. From the outburst of Information and Communication Technologies, virtual and remote labs have added to hands-on labs a new conception of practical experience, especially in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics education. This paper aims at describing the features of a remote lab named Virtual Instruments System in Reality, embedded in a community of practice and forming the spearhead of a federation of remote labs. More particularly, it discusses the advantages and disadvantages of remote labs over virtual labs as regards to scalability constraints and development and maintenance costs. Finally, it describes an actual implementation in an international community of practice of engineering schools forming the embryo of a first world wide federation of Virtual Instruments System in Reality nodes, under the framework of a project funded by the Erasmus+ Program.