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The use of computers and multimedia, as well as the World Wide Web and new communication technologies, allows new forms of teaching and learning like distance learning, blended learning, use of virtual libraries and many more. The herewith discussed RCL project shall offer an additional contribution. The basic idea is for a user to connect via the Internet with a computer from place A, to a real experiment carried out in place B. An overview of our technical and didactical developments as well as an outlook on future plans are presented. Currently, about 10 RCLs have been implemented. The essential characteristics of an RCL are the intuitive use and interactivity (operating the technical parameters), the possibility of different points of view of the ongoing experiment thanks to web cams, and the quickest possible transfer of the data measured by the user. A reasonable use of sensibly chosen real experiments as remote labs allows a new form of homework and exercises, as well as project work and the execution of experiments, which usually would a teacher's prerogative only.

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Remotely controlled laboratories are real experiments that can be controlled by users from their computers via the Internet. We present an overview of technical and pedagogical developments, describe the diversity and potential of our experiments, and comment on their acceptance by physics instructors.

The matrix isolation technique is traditionally used to investigate the properties of the matrix-isolated species themselves or to solve some special questions of the theory of defects in solids. We showed here that the optical spectroscopy of real matrix-isolated molecules can be successfully used to investigate the host crystal qualities, too. We demonstrated the capacity of modern FTIR spectroscopy to study the properties of cryocrystals such as phase transitions, solubility boundaries, orientational order parameter, etc., by monitoring the behavior of the IR-active molecules, which are present in matrices under investigation as a natural contamination (40 ppb). Due to the excellent optical quality of our crystal samples, we were able to determine a part of the binary phase diagram CO–O2 (at CO concentrations less than 1 ppm) as well as to investigate the kinetics of phase transitions. Furthermore, we successfully used the spectroscopy of the matrix-isolated molecules to proof that the α-β phase transition of the matrix crystal (O2) is of first order.