Providing collaborative support to virtual and remote laboratories

Abstract

Virtual and remote laboratories (VRLs) are e-learning resources that enhance the accessibility of experimental setups providing a distance teaching framework which meets the student's hands-on learning needs. In addition, online collaborative communication represents a practical and a constructivist method to transmit the knowledge and experience from the teacher to students, overcoming physical distance and isolation. This paper describes the extension of two open source tools: 1) the learning management system Moodle, and 2) the tool to create VRLs Easy Java Simulations (EJS). Our extension provides: 1) synchronous collaborative support to any VRL developed with EJS (i.e., any existing VRL written in EJS can be automatically converted into a collaborative lab with no cost), and 2) support to deploy synchronous collaborative VRLs into Moodle. Using our approach students and/or teachers can invite other users enrolled in a Moodle course to a real-time collaborative experimental session, sharing and/or supervising experiences at the same time they practice and explore experiments using VRLs.

Awareness and Reflection in Virtual and Remote Laboratories: the case of Computer Education

“…Several VRL stand on 3D virtual worlds such as Wonderland or Second Life to provide awareness about what partners are doing (Fayolle, Gravier and Jailly, 2010;Scheucher et al, 2009;Arango et al, 2007;Garcia-Zubia et al, 2010); these highly immersive environments offer learners the opportunity to observe how others interact with the VRL. Viewing others' actions can also be achieved by screen sharing protocols (Tee, Greenberg and Gutwin, 2006), applets (de la Torre et al, 2013;Jara et al, 2012) or other ad hoc solutions (Scheucher et al, 2009). Other approaches that allow collaboration between peers are based on event propagation across the various users' interfaces (de la Torre et al, 2013): to share a resource of the lab between several participants (i.e.…”

“…Viewing others' actions can also be achieved by screen sharing protocols (Tee, Greenberg and Gutwin, 2006), applets (de la Torre et al, 2013;Jara et al, 2012) or other ad hoc solutions (Scheucher et al, 2009). Other approaches that allow collaboration between peers are based on event propagation across the various users' interfaces (de la Torre et al, 2013): to share a resource of the lab between several participants (i.e. to offer them the opportunity to manipulate the same resource), the state of the virtual lab resulting from an action carried out by one of the participants is broadcasted to all users.…”

Assisted Creation and Deployment of Javascript Remote Experiments

“…After the well succeed remote experiment interface built in Javascript using EjsS and embedded into Moodle [17] this tool became popular at the group of remote labs at FEUP. So, other examples have been on the way.…”

“…For this, a plugin (developed by some of the authors) called EJSApp [17] is used. Not only the applications get embedded in the LMS but they also gain some additional features automatically, such as: connection with a booking system that may be PAPER ASSISTED CREATION AND DEPLOYMENT OF JAVASCRIPT REMOTE EXPERIMENTS used for controlling the access to the remote experiment, multilanguage support, saving data and image files from the virtual or remote experiment application to the users' files repository in the LMS, grading, monitoring the time spent by users working with the experiment or backup and restore options.…”

Evaluation of student software tools for supporting an understanding of PID tuning

“…This paper will not discuss the popular alternative of remote laboratories (Abdulwahed, 2010;Chen et al, 2013;Qiao et al, 2012;Rossiter et al, 2011Rossiter et al, , 2014Vargas et al, 2011;de la Torre et al, 2013) as these rarely overcome the access problems for large classes, typically requiring serial access by users. Moreover, the overheads in maintenance, initial design and build can be substantial and thus they require significant in house expertise and committment.…”