Virtual and Remote Laboratory Development: A Review

Abstract

The Internet technology has provided additional teaching strategies, with online education being one of the most exciting enhancements. A particular challenge for online education in engineering is how to extend the traditional hands-on laboratories to the Internet. Currently, there are two approaches to conducting labs online, virtual and remote labs. Virtual lab is based on software to simulate the lab environment while remote lab, by definition, is an experiment which is conducted and controlled remotely through the Internet. These experiments use real components or instrumentation at a different location from where they are being controlled or conducted. There are many emerging technologies which have been used to develop the virtual and remote laboratory. However, there are few papers that review the virtual and remote laboratory development. In this paper, a review of the different online delivery methods for virtual and remote laboratory development is presented. The open research issues and conclusion with possible future directions on the virtual and remote engineering laboratory development is also presented.

The Smart Device Specification for Remote Labs

“…While in a traditional client-server architecture [9], the server and client share a specification that is often uniquely used by them. On the contrary, the Smart Device paradigm defines one common specification that is shared by all Smart Devices.…”

“…Afterwards, the metadata design choices and the metadata for the services are described, and then we describe how metadata can be added for additional services. Since all above-mentioned languages were hard to use WebSockets with, we have opted for Swagger v1.2 9 . Swagger is a JSON-based description language meant for RESTful APIs, but it was easily extensible to WebSockets, while conserving all of Swagger's features.…”

An online lab for digital electronics course using information technology supports

“…Today there are many lab course designs apply the internet facility as one part to support its implementation. This phenomenon introduces the emergence of new terms such as web-based laboratories [4], and webbased experiments [5] that was triggered up by the high access of the internet network at any educational institution especially in the universities and in the family.…”

A Learning Style Comparison between Synchronous Online and Face-to-Face Engineering Graphics Instruction

“…Progressive work regarding lab experiences is currently being developed. Literature is now reflecting an emphasis in the development of virtual and remote laboratory experiences for online engineering students (Chen, Song, & Zhang, 2010;Chen, Olmi, & Song, 2010;Cooper, 2005;Hesselink et al, 2003;Saad, Saliah-Hassane, Hassan, El-Guetioui, & Cheriet, 2002) leading the way into finding legitimate laboratory alternatives. An additional barrier with some engineering education faculty is a sense that online education is typified by an isolated, individualized, self-paced instruction model (Bourne, Harris, & Mayadas, 2005).…”