Practical experiences on building structured remote and virtual laboratories from the student's point of view

Abstract

Nowadays, the use of remote laboratories is a common feature in order to get students involved in practical experiences. This is particularly important in distance learning environment. The regular practice is to develop a particular laboratory, required by the student competence's curricula. Usually, this involves a lack of methodology or a standard procedure so, new developments must be done to include new laboratories, additionally so many "manual" procedures are required. RELATED (REmote LABoratory Extended) it's used to solve these issues. In this paper, a practical experience of the structured development process of a virtual laboratory, using RELATED framework, will be presented from the point of view of students. This virtual laboratory is a simple signal generator. This signal generator will be used to generate a reference position for the height of the ball of an electromagnetic levitation system in a control experiment. Finally, responses of surveys made by students will be presented, in order to get satisfaction results of using/development of virtual/remote laboratories using RELATED.Index Terms -remote experimenting, virtual and remote laboratories, software development, services and facilities, practical experience II. INTRODUCTIONAcquiring qualitative knowledge is one of the most important things in control engineering education [1-3]. Giving students a taste of real situations, the behavior of measure instruments and how does the control action work, is a vital aspect nowadays. All these things can be done with laboratory experiments although it can be tricky with a large amount of students or in distance learning environment, as it is proposed by UNED (National Distance University of Spain) in its official degrees.The idea is for the students to be able to perform real experiments [4][5], in real time, on real equipment, but over the Internet. This idea is in fact a widely discussed issue. In this general context there are many works, but all these remote and virtual laboratories are punctual efforts of different research groups. The use of the software and hardware of different universities is not contemplated in any case, not taking advantage of the work previously carried out by others. This is to say, a lack of methodology or a standard for the construction of networks of virtual/remote laboratories based on previous developments. Also, services and facilities for all of these laboratories are not present.RELATED framework [6] proposes a structured methodology of remote/virtual labs development and, also, provides common facilities as user management, booking, basic visualization (trend graphs and direct interaction using interactive variables), data logging and experimental session's control. A RLAB (Remote LABoratory) system is defined using a formal specification (which is LEDML, based on XML). The main component is an experiment, which is defined on the laboratory XML specification. To integrate a laboratory as a RLAB system is only necessary to develop local access to laboratory equipme...

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