Abstract-This paper presents the Smart Device specification to interface with remote labs. To encourage the broader sharing of remote labs, the Smart Device paradigm decouples the client from the server and provides well-defined interfaces between client and server. Such Smart Device services are exposed on the Internet and enable interoperability with client applications, other Smart Devices and external services (e.g. a booking service). This paper presents the extensible and platform-agnostic specification of the Smart Device services and internal functionalities. The Smart Device specification contains sufficient service metadata to enable the automatic generation of basic client applications. The specification is illustrated through an example and first implementations of the specification are presented.

Abstract-Open Educational Resources (OERs) are freely accessible, openly licensed multimedia documents or interactive tools that can be typically integrated in Learning Management Systems to support courses. With social media platforms becoming the central piece of the students' digital ecosystem, there is an emerging need to provide resources that can be integrated in various general-purpose open platforms. Courses are also deconstructed in smaller learning units for personal learning activities or in Massive Open Online Course sessions. As a consequence, rich self-contained educational resources embedding their pedagogical context and modality are required (these elements not being elicited anymore from the course itself). This paper presents Inquiry Learning Spaces (ILSs) -pedagogically structured learning environments that can contain labs, apps and resources-as rich OERs. Teachers can create ILSs for their students (as standalone resources or embedded in other platforms) and share them with other teachers who can adapt the ILS to their needs.

Abstract. Remote laboratories are an important component of blended and distance science and engineering education. By definition, they provide access to a physical lab in a distant location. Many architectures enabling remote laboratory systems exist, the most common of which are Client-Server based. In this context, the Server interfaces the physical setup and makes it software-accessible. The Smart Device Specifications revisit a Client-Server architecture, with the main aim of cancelling the dependencies which inherently exist between a Client and a Server. This is done by describing the Server as a set of services, which are exposed as well-defined APIs. If a remote laboratory is built following the Smart Device Specifications, any person with programming skills can create a personalized client application to access the lab. But in practice, teachers rely on the mediated contact with a lab provider to have information about what kind of experiment(s) the lab in question implements. Even though there is a complete description of the available sensors and actuators making up a lab and how to be accessed, it is not clear how they are connected (relationships). In this sense, a list of sensors and actuators are not enough to make a guided selection of components to create the interface to an experiment. Therefore, the aim of this work is to support teachers in choosing the experiments and creating the respective UI on their own, in a pedagogically oriented scenario and by taking into consideration the target online learning environment. This is done by revisiting the Smart Device Specifications and extending them, in addition to proposing a tool that will automatically generate the user interface of the chosen experiment(s).

No abstract

Abstract-This paper presents the Smart Device specification to interface with remote labs. To encourage the broader sharing of remote labs, the Smart Device paradigm decouples the client from the server and provides well-defined interfaces between client and server. Such Smart Device services are exposed on the Internet and enable interoperability with client applications, other Smart Devices and external services (e.g. a booking service). This papers presents the extensible and platform-agnostic specification of the Smart Device services and internal functionalities. The Smart Device specification contains sufficient service metadata to enable the automatic generation of basic client applications. The specification is illustrated through an example and first implementations of the specification are presented.