Online remote laboratories are a particularly promising tool for effective STEM education. They offer online universal access to different hardware devices in which students can experiment and can test and improve their knowledge. However, most of them have two significant limitations. First, given that most of them are developed as, or evolve from single-user proofs of concept, they have no scalability provisions other than full laboratory replication. And second, when this is done, cost efficiency is often neglected. This paper presents the requirements for the creation of a novel remote laboratory architecture focused on, but not limited to, embedded systems experimentation. An architecture, based on Redis (an open source, in-memory data structure store, which is often used as database, cache or message broker), a modular design, and hardware-sharing techniques, is proposed in order to achieve the combined requirements of high scalability and cost efficiency. This mixed hardware-software architecture serves as a basis for the development of remote laboratories, especially those focused on microcontroller-based systems experimentation and embedded devices experimentation. From a user perspective the architecture is webbased, and has provisions to be easily adaptable to different Learning Management Systems and different hardware embedded devices. A new microcontroller-oriented remote laboratory based on the architecture has been developed, with the aim of providing valid evaluation data, and has been used in a real environment. The architecture and the resulting remote laboratory have been compared with other state of the art remote laboratories and their architectures. Results suggest that the proposed architecture does indeed meet the main requirements, which are scalability through replicability and cost efficiency. Furthermore, similarly to previous architectures, it promotes usability, universal access, modularity and reliability. INDEX TERMS Remote laboratory, scalability, embedded system, online experimentation, architecture. JAVIER GARCÍA-ZUBÍA (M'08-SM'11) received the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Deusto, Spain. He is currently a Full Professor with the Faculty of Engineering, University of Deusto. He is the Leader of the WebLab-Deusto Research Group. His research interests include remote laboratory design, implementation, and evaluation. DIEGO LÓPEZ-DE-IPIÑA received the Ph.D. degree from the University of Cambridge, in 2002. Responsible for several modules in the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in computer engineering, he is interested in pervasive computing, the IoT, semantic service middleware, open linked data, and social data mining. He is currently an Associate Professor and a Principal Researcher with the MORElab Group, Faculty of Engineering, University of Deusto. He is taking and has taken part in several big consortium-based research European (EDI, GreenSoul, WeLive, SIM-PATICO, IES CITIES, or GOLAB) and Spanish projects, and has more than
Intelligent tutors and conversational agents (CAs) have proven to be useful learning tools. They have potential not only as stand-alone devices but also as integrable components to enrich and complement other educational resources. For this, new authoring approaches and platforms are required. They should be accessible to non-programmers (such as most teachers) and they should be integrable into current web-based educational platforms. This paper proposes a new approach to define such agents through a visual domain-specific language based on Google Blockly (a scratch-like language). It also develops a web-based integrable authoring platform to serve as a prototype, describing the requirements and architecture. To evaluate whether this novel approach is effective, a multi-stage experiment was conducted. First, participants learned to use the prototype authoring platform through an interactive tutorial. Second, they created a CA with a specific domain model. Times and performance were measured. Finally, they answered a standardized usability questionnaire (UMUX) and a purpose-specific survey. Results show that participants were able to learn to use the domain-specific language in a short time. Moreover, the purpose-specific survey indicates that their perception of the approach (and its potential) is positive. The standardized questionnaire indicates that even in its prototype stage, its usability is satisfactory. INDEX TERMS Visual programming languages, customizable systems, conversational agents, intelligent tutoring systems, online learning, online labs. JAVIER GARCÍA-ZUBIA (M'08-SM'11) received the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Deusto, Spain. He is a Full Professor with the Faculty of Engineering, University of Deusto. He is the Leader of the WebLab-Deusto Research Group. His research interest is focused on remote laboratory design, implementation, and evaluation. PABLO ORDUÑA (M'05) received the degree in computer engineering and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Deusto in 2007 and 2013, respectively. During his Ph.D., he was a Visiting Researcher twice for six weeks each, in the MIT CECI in 2011 and UNED DIEEC in 2012. He has also attended two programs for entrepreneurship training at Singularity University: Global Solutions Program and Launchpad. Since 2004, he has also been involved in the WebLab-Deusto Research Group, leading the design and development of WebLab-Deusto, and a Later Researcher and the Project Manager of the MORElab (DeustoTech Internet) until 2017. He is the CEO at LabsLand (spin-off of the WebLab-Deusto project), and an external collaborator at DeustoTech.
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