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Abstract-It is of crucial importance the integration of practical sessions in engineering curricula owing to their significant role in understanding engineering concepts and scientific phenomena. However, the lack of practical sessions due to the high costs of the equipment and the unavailability of instructors has caused a significant declination in experimentation in engineering education. Remote laboratories have tackled this issues providing online reusable and shared workbenches unconstrained by neither geographical nor time considerations. Thereby, they have extremely proliferated among universities and integrated into engineering curricula over the last decade. This contribution compiles diverse experiences based on the deployment of the remote laboratory, Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality (VISIR), on the practices of undergraduate engineering grades at various universities within the VISIR community. It aims to show the impact of its usage on engineering education concerning the assessments of students and teachers as well. In addition, the paper address the next challenges and future works carried out at several universities within the VISIR community.

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

Remote laboratories are software and hardware tools that allow students to remotely access real equipment located in universities. The integration of remote laboratories in Learning Tools (Learning Management Systems, Content Management Systems or Personal Learning Environments) has been achieved to integrate remote laboratories as part of the learning curricula. A cross-institutional initiative called gateway4labs has been created to perform this integration extensible to multiple remote laboratories in multiple learning tools. This contribution focuses on describing this initiative and, in particular, how opening it to public systems (where users do not need to be registered) produces new technical and organizational challenges due to the public availability of labs. Additionally, this contribution shows integrations of systems that were not previously addressed in this initiative, such as PhET or ViSH, as well as a new approach for integrating supported laboratories in external specifications such as the Smart Device one through OpenSocial.

During the last decade, efforts have been made in the development and publishing of remote experiments for educational purposes. In order to reduce the duplicity of work and to improve the common requirements that are shared by different remote laboratories, remote experiment management platforms have been developed, such as MIT iLabs, LabShare Sahara or WebLab-Deusto. In this paper, we describe how the development of experiments is handled in WebLab-Deusto, supporting both managed (developed used the APIs provided by WebLab-Deusto) and unmanaged experiments (using Virtual Machines or LabVIEW), and comparing both approaches. It also shows the results of integrating remote experiments under this system, with the use case of VISIR, the electronics remote laboratory developed in BTH

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