<span lang="EN-US">Experimentation plays an essential role in engineering education, allowing to balance theoretical proofs and emphasis on physical intuition. Laboratories can fulfil several goals at once, but they also involve high costs, mostly due to equipment, space, and human resources for operating and maintaining them. Remote-access labs have been proposed as a feasible alternative: developed since the early 2000s by an ever-increasing research community, they are real or virtual labs accessible at distance through a computer network. Recently, alternative bibliometric taxonomies and classifications of current networked remote-access labs have been proposed. Yet, none of these works proposes a comprehensive structure to collect and organize the information, especially from a technical perspective, aiming at the definition of the state of the art and future outlooks of provided solutions. In the present work, we fill this gap extending previous works by enlarging their set of criteria towards a general multi-layer model for networked remote-access labs. We performed a systematic review of relevant literature to retrieve useful information to design the structure and then validated it by using a mini-Delphi method. </span>

Lab-based education has always played an important role in teaching students. Making remote and virtual labs communicate with one another by creating networks of labs can enhance the traditional way of learning as well as reduce the costs of implementing and using labs. This paper provides a review of the literature on non-traditional labs and lab network initiatives up to 2020. With the term ‘non-traditional labs’, we mean virtual, remote and hybrid labs, whereas with the term ‘lab network’, we indicate a set of two or more cooperating labs typically connected through the internet. In this study, we used a recent and comprehensive framework for data collection, organization and analysis to gather information on 40 non-traditional labs and lab network initiatives. Thanks to this framework, the outcomes of our work highlight interesting trends of lab-based education, which pertain to didactical, organizational and technical aspects.

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