Sharing Remote Labs: A Case Study

The interest on educational remote laboratories has increased, as have the technologies involved in their development and deployment. These laboratories enable students to use real equipment located in the university from the Internet. This way, students can extend their personal learning experience by testing with real equipment what they are studying at home, or performing hands-on-lab sessions at night, on weekends or whenever the traditional laboratories are physically closed. A unique feature of remote laboratories when compared to traditional laboratories is that the distance of the student is not an issue, so remote laboratories can be shared with other schools or universities. In this contribution, authors present and discuss a widely spread remote laboratory (VISIR, present in 6 european universities + 1 in India) shared among 3 institutions (2 universities + 1 high school). During the exhibition, demonstration of the laboratories being shared will be shown.

The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in virtual practical labs is revolutionizing the education sector by providing immersive, adaptive, and cost-effective learning experiences. Virtual labs offer significant advantages, such as flexibility, scalability, and accessibility. This paper explores the current state of AI-driven virtual labs, their benefits, challenges, and future prospect, especially in the context of STEM education and research.We analyse AI applications in laboratory simulations, personalized learning, automated assessment, and real-time feedback. Virtual practical lab powered by AI – enhance Virtual Practical labs provide impressive, interactive ,and personalized learning experience, enabling students to conduct experiments in simulated environment that conduct mimic real- world scenarios .Furthermore, we discuss ethical considerations, technological advancements, and case studies of AI-based virtual labs in science, engineering, and medical education. It’s impact on modern education, and the challenges associated with the implementation. The research concludes with recommendations for optimizing AI in virtual practical labs for enhanced pedagogical outcomes.

This study investigates the utilisation of virtual laboratories as a supplement to conventional laboratory settings for conducting formal science experiments. Although previous research acknowledges the growing integration of digital tools in science education, there remains limited empirical evidence comparing the effectiveness of virtual and traditional laboratory experiences in supporting conceptual understanding. Addressing this gap, the study aimed to examine whether virtual laboratory instruction enhances academic achievement in physical sciences to the same extent as traditional laboratory methods. A quasi-experimental design was employed using pre- and post-test achievement scores, and the treatment involved conducting an acid-base titration activity through a virtual laboratory. The participants consisted of two hundred and eleven grade eleven physical science learners selected through random sampling. Data were analysed using independent t-tests and analysis of variance. The findings indicate that the type of experimental environment influences learner performance, yet no meaningful difference was found between virtual and traditional laboratory groups. Both approaches contributed similarly to improved conceptual comprehension. The study implies that virtual laboratories can serve as viable alternatives where conventional facilities are limited, supporting flexible and accessible science instruction. Keywords: Conceptual comprehension; physical sciences; virtual laboratories; science education; traditional laboratories.

Facilitating the Creation of Virtual and Remote Laboratories for Science and Engineering Education

Laboratory experiments are considered to be a crucial component of engineering and science curricula by all stakeholders in the education process. In traditional laboratories, students develop practical skills and become effective professionals. However, the major drawbacks of traditional laboratories are their high demand on resources, significant maintenance costs and the inability to delivery the laboratory content in distance education. Virtual laboratory experiments represent a valuable option for educational laboratories, due to their advantages over traditional hands-on as well as remote experiments, including the ease of reconfiguring the experimental system, the high flexibility in the input specifications, the possibility of conducting experiments using devices otherwise infeasible and the option of re-running experiments multiple times.
 In response to the need for developing laboratory resources that provide a practical experience to online engineering students, this paper describes a simulation-based virtual laboratory, which is used at Stevens Institute of Technology (SIT) in a junior-level course on mechanisms and machine dynamics as a compliment to experimental work in the traditional hands-on laboratory. This virtual laboratory system alleviates the space, time and cost constraints associated with traditional laboratories and serves as an efficient teaching aid. It conveys to the students practical issues associated with actual experiments and provides learning outcomes that are comparable to those of traditional physical laboratories. The students have the opportunity to explore a wide range of experimental configurations and parameters. In addition, the system includes a realistic rendering of the experimental setup and its components, thus providing the students with a strong feeling of immersion, as if they were performing an experiment in a traditional laboratory.

Remote and Virtual Labs for Engineering Education 4.0: Achievements of the ELLI project at the TU Dortmund University

Remote cybersecurity laboratories (remote labs) have become increasingly central to academic and professional training in cybersecurity, offering hands-on experiences and reducing the infrastructure requirements for institutions. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the software requirements and challenges associated with implementing remote labs in cybersecurity education. The authors review existing literature; highlight gaps; propose best practices for designing robust, scalable, and secure remote lab environments; and emphasize the significance of addressing pedagogical needs alongside technical constraints. The insights presented aim to guide educators, system designers, and policymakers toward effective adoption and improvement of remote cybersecurity labs.

Laboratory experimentation in the context of school science is a widely advocated teaching strategy for the simplification of several abstract scientific concepts. Laboratory-based learning activities have proven to enhance learners’ conceptual and procedural understandings of micro chemical phenomena, thus boosting achievement in chemistry content tests. In the South African education landscape where there is inequitable distribution of resources for laboratory-based science learning, this study exploited how available virtual learning resources could also be used for learning chemistry concepts, and further compared student achievement in chemistry content test post intervention with both traditional and virtual laboratory learning resources. In this quasi- experimental study, we provided a group of third-year pre-service science teachers (n=50) with four chemistry concepts to learn using a hands-on traditional (control group) and a virtual laboratory (experimental group) intervention. The same pre and post chemistry content test was administered to control and experimental groups of pre-service teachers (herein also referred to as students), before and after learning interventions, with the aim of assessing students’ achievements post- learning in the two different laboratory environments. Tests scores were analysed and the results of a paired-sample t-test showed a statistically significant difference between pre- and post-test results for all groups of students. Using independent sample t-tests, we further compared post-test scores for the control and experimental groups which revealed the mean post-test score of the experimental group (M = 79.36, SD = 8.306), being significantly higher than that of the control group (M = 68.72, SD = 9.076) at t (48) = 4.32, p < .01. The findings from these tests indicated that, students obtained significantly higher achievement scores post- laboratory learning interventions and that virtual laboratory interventions yielded significantly higher achievement scores than traditional laboratory interventions. Based on these findings, the researchers concluded that, laboratory learning has a positive impact on achievement in chemistry and that virtual laboratories provide a worthy complement for traditional laboratories when learning abstract and difficult chemistry concepts. Implications of these findings and some recommendations for practice and research are also discussed herein.

Taking in consideration the new trends in Open Source Systems, we present a solution based Java technology used to help students to take measurements in the lab. Also it can be integrated as an educational remote laboratory. The remote laboratory consist in a web server, where students can access to educational materials and also collect data from different stands having the possibility to also control them, under a supervised and controlled environment. The stands are made with industrial devices: programmable logic controller (PLC), human machine interface (HMI) and various industrial sensors. This system can be very useful in the new information society to create a modern virtual laboratory for a remote teaching.

The emergence of problems such as the COVID-19 pandemic that currently occurred interfere the implementation of teaching and learning activities in schools. Especially for science learning, it is not only about the content but also the processes to improve student’s skills, such as science process skills. Current technological advances make it possible to conduct distance learning using media such as virtual lab. This study aims to review the comparison of the effectiveness between virtual lab and traditional lab, the use of virtual lab on student’s science process skills, and the use of virtual lab as a medium of distance learning. This study uses a systematic literature review method with 22 selected articles. The results indicate that the use of virtual lab media has the same or even better effectiveness than traditional labs. The use of virtual lab enable to enhance student’s science process skills, especially in predicting and measuring. This is because the virtual lab media able to provide opportunities and flexibilities for students to conduct experiments by the level of ability and pace of learning each student, anytime and anywhere. Thus, the virtual lab media is feasible to be used as an alternative substitute method for distance learning.

Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic, higher education witnessed a paradigm shift in the teaching-learning strategies everywhere from the original way where everything was largely conducted face-to-face. Teachers, educators, and students had to suddenly move to the virtual mode to continue their classes in schools, institutes, and universities. Recently, many published studies have revealed the utmost need to improve teaching strategies, particularly in an online lecture setting. However, the major impediment was observed in higher educational institutions (HEIs) where teachers had to conduct laboratory experiments in hard sciences, particularly in physics, chemistry and, biochemistry. Of these subjects taught in graduate classes, chemistry is a complex subject. A chemistry learner needs to acquire hands-on experience, especially when performing organic preparations and instrumental analyses. Chemistry teachers believed that nothing could ever replace a traditional laboratory setting, but now the situation has changed to a certain extent. It has always been argued that students do not learn by merely clicking on simulated glassware and instruments. In a typical organic chemistry laboratory, students prepare organic compounds, purify them, and determine various properties of the pure compounds. Students gain experience by trial-error while adding reagents in organic preparation, devising reaction mechanisms, observing the physical properties of purified compounds, and even separating complex mixtures. Virtual laboratories cannot replace all these with a mere simulator, but when one deals with corrosive chemicals and advanced instrumental methods, it seems a plausible solution to augment them with traditional laboratories. It was found that using advanced level of online screen experiments improved students understanding and also helped them score well in their laboratory assessments. Virtual simulations cannot replace traditional laboratories since many experiments require hands-on tool abilities, smelling, seeing colored complexes, and trial-error strategies. It was also observed that experiments that require costly instruments can be carried as a remote trigger, paving the way to augment virtual experiments in the future chemistry laboratory. The chapter discusses the pedagogical design for graduate students in a virtual chemistry laboratory and live demonstrations performed in the traditional laboratory. In this chapter chemistry experiments based on organic synthesis, stereochemistry and spectroscopy on a virtual screen have been studied. The different modalities of conducting virtual screen experiments, assessment strategies, and government initiatives are also highlighted. This chapter concludes with current and future trends of virtual chemistry laboratories with highlights on the barriers, opportunities, and key measures to resolve them.

An educational remote laboratory is a software and hardware tool that allows students to remotely access real equipment located in universities or educational centers. Federations of remote laboratories have existed for years: students of one university transparently access laboratories of other university through software systems that enable these contracts. However, traditionally these contracts have been defined in a "one to one" basis and both universities using the same remote laboratory management system. The focus of this contribution is to present different interoperable bridges among different remote laboratory systems and explore how they can be chained to build complex ecosystems of remote laboratories. The impact of this chaining is that, if successful, it would definitely contribute to the adoption of remote laboratories.

A model for evaluating the effectiveness of remote engineering laboratories and simulations in education

Virtual laboratory is a practical teaching assisted instruction with high efficiency. This paper analyzes the characteristics, classification of virtual laboratory and the design of virtual instrument. It discusses the construction and system structure of network-based virtual laboratory. This paper also proposes design method of hardware and software, and provides a reference for the construction of virtual laboratory. Preface The famous American national instrument company (NI), first proposed the concept of software as an instrument of virtual instrument in the mid - 1980s(1). Virtual instrument is a kind of equipment which combines the hardware resources and the actual equipment together into a whole through the application of software, and completes the data display, data analysis processing and other functions through the software. Virtual laboratory is based on the technical support of computer hardware and software to realize the virtual environment and the virtual experimental methods(2). The real experimental environment and equipment and the experimental process that the virtual experiment reproduced ,provided the experimenter very real feeling, and it is easy to use, it has high efficiency, and not be limited by time and place, etc.The application of virtual laboratory allows students the freedom to experiment and realize data sharing. For the courses in the Science and Engineering Colleges or Universities, the experimental teaching is very important. The existing experiment teaching content and method have great limitations(3). There are some problems, such as time-consuming in management, decentralization of funds, backward equipment, low utilization of the laboratory, restriction of students' practice, etc. Virtual laboratory(1) can solve the problem effectively. In recent years, virtual experiment has become a product of information technology and computer network technology, it is the important means to improve science experiment mode and method(4), and it will be very helpful to improve the quality of experiment teaching. some universities and research institutions have established a certain scale specialized virtual laboratory, and received good effect. The construction and popularization of university virtual laboratory has become an inexorable trend of the future development.

NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract Main Menu Session 2258 “Lab@Home”: An Internet-Based Real Laboratory for Distance Control Education N. Sepehri , S. Onyshko, W. Lehn, R. Song , Z. Zheng The University of Manitoba Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada R3T-5V6 The Faculty of Engineering at the University of Manitoba completed the development of software drivers and interfacing programs to establish a prototype remote control laboratory station. The station, which can be operated from a distance, is called “Lab@Home” and is becoming a part of core control courses in the Faculty of Engineering. This paper presents the motivation behind this initiation as well as step-by-step development of the test station. Typical results obtained by students are also provided. 1. Introduction The motivation for the construction of this station comes from the fact that the control laboratories at the University of Manitoba are heavily utilized by as many as 200 students each year. At the present time, we are unable to provide the students enough exposure to the equipment due to the increased number of students as well as limited access time (e.g., the lab can not be open after 6:30 pm, a period in which students may have more time to do the experiments on their own time). Lab@Home will allow the students to work with the real system by remotely operating it at any time and from any places, therefore, increasing the exposure to the experimental facility. Compared to other valuable attempts to develop a virtual laboratory for control education, whereby the students deal with virtual (simulated) systems, via Internet, here we allow the students to run a real system remotely which is believed to be more effective. Lab@Home is an interactive setup in which the students can study PID control implementation and tuning issues for typical first- and second- order systems. The goal is to perform actual experiments and relate the findings to the theoretical analyses. The test station allows the students to perform a “do-and-see” approach anytime and from the comfort of their home and thus, they will not be restricted to certain laboratory access times. This gives the students a chance to redo the experiments many times, any time and from any remote computer system. In short, the remote laboratory allows more exposure of the students to an experimental test rig. “Proceedings of 2002 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright  2002, American Society for Engineering Education“ Main Menu