Lab Networks in Engineering Education: A Proposed Structure for Organizing Information

Abstract

<span lang="EN-US">Experimentation plays an essential role in engineering education, allowing to balance theoretical proofs and emphasis on physical intuition. Laboratories can fulfil several goals at once, but they also involve high costs, mostly due to equipment, space, and human resources for operating and maintaining them. Remote-access labs have been proposed as a feasible alternative: developed since the early 2000s by an ever-increasing research community, they are real or virtual labs accessible at distance through a computer network. Recently, alternative bibliometric taxonomies and classifications of current networked remote-access labs have been proposed. Yet, none of these works proposes a comprehensive structure to collect and organize the information, especially from a technical perspective, aiming at the definition of the state of the art and future outlooks of provided solutions. In the present work, we fill this gap extending previous works by enlarging their set of criteria towards a general multi-layer model for networked remote-access labs. We performed a systematic review of relevant literature to retrieve useful information to design the structure and then validated it by using a mini-Delphi method. </span>

Non-Traditional Labs and Lab Network Initiatives: A Review

“…To overcome these limitations, we used the method for evaluating LNIs introduced by Romagnoli et al [23]. Here, the authors delimit three dimensions of relevant information:…”

“…As already stated in the previous section, Potkonjak et al [43] performed a similar analysis using a well-structed framework to evaluate 20 LNIs. So, before applying the comprehensive method by Romagnoli et al [23], we extended the original set of LNIs from 20 to 40. This was made following a two-way approach, as described next.…”

“…We collected and analyzed information from 40 LNIs following the framework described in Romagnoli et al [23], which we will refer to as 'LNI framework' from now on. The LNI framework is very broad and detailed, as it covers general, didactical, and technical aspects.…”

“…The possible cause of this fact could be traced to the lack of a common standards to evaluate the architecture of the existing networks of labs [22]. However, a proposal to organize information on technical aspects of NTLs and LNIs has been recently provided by [23].…”

“…• (RQ2) What is the state of the art of NTLs and LNIs? RQ1 is answered by a literature review of existing research; RQ2, instead, is answered by applying the structure designed by [23] for collecting and organizing information on NTLs and LNIs. This structure is adopted since it identifies the relevant information needed, from organizational, didactical, and technical perspectives.…”