Welcome...
Dear Teachers this module is totally dedicated to you.
During this training course you will go through different topics, starting from the classification of online labs until the description of the architecture that Carinthia University of Applied Sciences is using to deliver the online laboratories. Examples on online labs and future trends in remote technologies will be presented as well.
We will try to make this module as easy as possible and to make you understand WHY, WHEN and HOW we use remote laboratories in the learning process.
WHY we should use Online Labs?
- The high cost of equipment brings us to the first barrier against the practice of using traditional labs even more broadly, as not all universities and institutions can afford these labs or even make them available to their learners. Even if the laboratory hardware is not expensive, many universities still have to deal with the increasing number of students, which makes it impossible to accommodate them and respect the individuality of each one when carrying out an experiment, as usually students have different knowledge levels and some have more experience than others.
- Online Laboratories allow users to perform real experiments from a remote location
- Using Online Labs facilitates crossing some barriers imposed by traditional labs, like high costs of equipment, personal and lab equipment maintenance
- Independency of time to carry out an experiment
- It allows for demonstrations in class while the teacher is exposes introduces a specific topic to their students, again without setting up lab equipment during lessons
WHEN we use Online Labs?
One of the reasons of using online was: "independency of time to carry out an experiment".
What this means?
The answer is simple: Users of Online Labs are not subjected to traditional laboratories and universities staff schedules. They are usually accessible in a 24/7 basis, allowing learners to fit lab practice with their own schedule.
HOW we use Online Labs at CUAS?
Despite the widely acknowledged benefits of Online labs, the growing number of them and their developers poses a constraint. Usually, each lab developer has his/her own approach to deliver Online Labs, especially concerning the user interface delivery, data storage, data management, communication protocols and user management. This lack of standardization creates difficulties to share those labs with users from other institutions, as the responsibility for managing fall upon the institution that developed the lab.
Another important issue associated with the increasing number of Online Labs is scalability. Scalability is defined as the ability of a system to handle growing amount of work or to be readily enlarged. Usually, small lab developers do not design an Online Lab with scalability in mind, specially referring to the user management and the creation of additional labs.
The iLab Shared Architecture (ISA) can be proposed as a solution to the lack of standardization and scalability. In this work, the development of Online Laboratories is in compliance with the ISA.
ISA offers a common framework to share Online Labs as it separates user management and experiment execution. It also offers an API (application programming interface) based on Web services to exchange data between servers and clients.
The way how ISA works will be discussed during this training course too.