This document discusses shareable educational architectures for remote laboratories in engineering education. It introduces remote laboratories, which allow students to control and administer online experiments interacting with physical instruments anywhere and anytime. Several existing remote laboratory systems are described that aim to integrate labs across learning management systems and universities through standard APIs. The document promotes the Global Online Laboratory Consortium which works to develop shared remote labs and interoperability between different remote lab systems to improve engineering education.

1. Shareable Educational Architectures
for Remote Laboratories
Mohamed Tawfik, Elio San Cristóbal, Alberto Pesquera, Rosario Gil, Sergio
Martin, Gabriel Díaz, Juan Peire, Manuel Castro, Rafael Pastor, Salvador
Ros, Roberto Hernández
Electrical & Computer Engineering Department
Spanish University for Distance Education (UNED)

2. The implementation of practical sessions in engineering education:
• Paves the way for students to be familiar with the instruments and
thus, with the industrial real-world.
• Augment the learning outcomes by strengthening the understanding of
scientific concepts and theories.

3. Remote laboratories facilitates the practical sessions availability
providing on-line ubiquitous workbenches unconstrained by neither
temporal nor geographical considerations.

4. Remote laboratories are those laboratories that can be controlled and
administrated online. They differ from the virtual simulated
laboratories as they are interacting with physical instruments.

5. The common generic architecture design of today’s remote laboratory
for industrial electronics applications.

6. Recently, remote laboratories have been developed at multiple
universities and adopted in engineering education. Furthermore, some
of these laboratories are replicated at many universities such as the
electronic circuit’s remote labs: NetLab, VISIR, and labs based on NI
ELVIS II.

7. This was the commence of a new mainstream which advocates a better
remodeling of those laboratories to allow their allocation, sharing among
universities, and their communication with other heterogeneous
systems, e.g., Learning Management Systems (LMS).

8. In this context, numerous sharable educational architectures for remote
labs integration have emerged such as
LiLa, Lab2go, ISILab, DCL, WebLab Deusto, iLab (ISA), and Labshare
(Sahara).

9. I. Integration with Metadata Repository

10. II. Integration with Learning Management Systems (LMSs)
…. LMS Lab1
Lab2
…. ….
Students
Provided Services:
Administrative tools
Scheduling
Synchronous and asynchronous
communication tools
Assessment and tracking tools
Multimedia sharing tools
Standard compatibility

11. III. Integration with Remote Laboratory Management Systems
(RLMSs)
…...
…... RLMS
USERS Common Access Portal Equipments
Management Lab Servers
Administrative Tools
Communication Tools
.. Diferent Remote Lab Systems
Other

12. GOLC: Global Online Laboratory Consortium
• The GOLC consortium is focused on promoting the development
and sharing of, and research into remotely accessible laboratories
for educational use.
• The GOLC partners include most of the pioneers in remote
laboratories development and deployment.
http://online-lab.org/

13. GOLC: Global Online Laboratory Consortium
• The trend in researching within GOLC is to create standard APIs
that allows communication with different remote laboratory
systems that adhere to this standard.
• For instance, users of Sahara could access experiments
integrated in iLab and vice versa.

14. Research on Technologies for Engineering Education
http://ohm.ieec.uned.es/
For more information about remote laboratories, we invite you to access to
the web page of the Electrical & Computer Engineering department of the
UNED.

15. Thanks for your Attention!
Gabriel Diaz
Electrical & Computer Engineering Department (DIEEC)
Spanish University for Distance Education (UNED)