Experimental and Virtual Laboratories in Distance Learning

 Remote teaching and distant learning take more and more a significant place in the universities. However, much of courses do not propose practical exercises. The goal of our project VITELS (Virtual Internet Telecommunications Laboratory of Switzerland) is to develop a course that provides practical exercises in the area of telecommunications and computer networks to the students. The exercises shall be performed by students remotely. Students do not need to be present in particular laboratory rooms. In addition, supplementary tutorial material and theoretical on-line exercises are under development. In total, seven modules and the authentication/authorization infrastructure will be developed and maintained by the different involved institutes and integrated into a common web environment. The basic course will consist of the following seven modules: Simulation of IP Network Configuration, Configuration and Performance Evaluation of a Real IP Network, Management and Configuration of a Virtual Network, Firewalls, Protocol Analysis, Linux System Installation and Configuration, Client/Server Programming. The development of the course by different partners allows to use the different available equipment resources at the different locations and to use the sophisticated technological knowledge and experience available at the various partner organisations.

This work describes the experience of the authors regarding the design, development, analysis, and exploitation of web-based technologies for creating an online experimentation framework with distance education purposes. The framework we propose is specially designed for scientific and technical courses that require a quite important presence of experimentation. It supports the development of virtual and remote laboratories, and their integration in a Learning Management System. In addition, to illustrate the applicability of our proposal this paper presents a network of remote and virtual laboratories for control engineering education that has been implemented with the framework.

In the recent years, many lecturers have incorporated remote laboratories in their subjects to improve their university classes. The remote laboratories give support to the practices of a subject. The goal of this paper is to describe the experience carried out in the subject computer networks at the Polytechnic University of Valencia by several lecturers. We have implemented a laboratory that allows remote access to real devices, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to the students of the technical engineering of telecommunications. This remote laboratory has increased the practice time for each student to work with real devices and have increased their experience in actual real study cases. On the other hand, we have noticed that, after this experience, they are familiarized with the working conditions they will face to when they begin to work as professionals in the real world.

International Journal of Engineering Education, 2009

Experimental installation of the`Electrical simulator of typical physical process' exercise in the field of automatic control is developed and presented. The structure of this laboratory exercise includes goals, possible educational tasks, structure and learning objectives. The initial educational results of implementation of web-based laboratory and remotely-controlled laboratory exercise in engineering and control engineering education are also presented. The effect of web-based laboratories is quantified by student feedback in both organization and effects of implementation.

IEEE Transactions on Education, 1996

Distance learning is an emerging paradigm where students, teachers, and equipment may be at different geographic locations. At the College of Engineering of Oregon State University, we have developed and demonstrated an innovative real-time remote-access control engineering teaching laboratory. Our remote laboratory uses the Internet to provide complete access to the usual laboratory facilities. In addition, remote power control, network reliability, and safety features are integrated into our experimental hardware and software design. Remotely located students are able to develop, compile, debug, and run controllers in real time on the experiments in our laboratory. Students can watch the experiment in real time from a remote workstation, hear the sounds in the laboratory, and interact with other laboratory users. Students can effectively use the laboratory from anywhere on the Internet. I. INTRODUCTION RACTICAL experience is a very important part of control engineering education, but it is resource intensive. Designing and constructing state-of-the-art control experiments can take time, money, and energy. Sharing experiments locally and remotely allows unique laboratory equipment to be utilized more fully, brings down the experiment cost per student, and makes more experiments available to students. Our goal with the remote laboratory paradigm is to make the equipment that we already have available to more students without taking away the experience of being physically present in the laboratory. Control engineering instruction should combine theory and practice in each lesson. Students must be able to model systems adequately in order to develop controllers that enforce certain performance requirements. After a controller is designed and simulated on the model, observing the dynamics of a physical implementation gives the student valuable insight. Data collection and visual feedback are important aspects in control engineering instruction for the modeling, system identification, and testing stages. In the past, students had to be in the laboratory to gain practical experience; with effective remote laboratories, students can be anywhere. Second Best to Being There (SBBT) is a network application, developed at Oregon State University, combining new and existing software and hardware to provide remote Manuscript