Spreading Remote Laboratory Scope Through a Federation of Nodes: VISIR Case

New social learning demands are fostered by continuous learning culture and self-learning environments. This demanding scenario requires ubiquitous educational environments without temporal restrictions. For these reasons, educational institutions increasingly rely on remote laboratories (RLs) as educational tools in order to provide real-world experiences in science education. RLs present several advantages to students which have been widely reported. Although quite powerful, RLs have intrinsically some drawbacks. While some of these drawbacks are inherent to the remote interaction and cannot be addressed, such as the impossibility to provide manual skill, many others derive from technical constraints. Traditionally, the approach to deal with these limitations on the performance is based on the redesign and improvement of the RL. However, due to the number of operating systems, an alternative approach is open for a RL: Virtual Instruments System in Reality (VISIR). VISIR is a RL designed to construct and test electrical/electronic circuits. The possibility of building a federation of VISIR nodes emerged from the actual needs detected by the VISIR community. In this paper, we describe a federation of VISIR nodes reporting the architecture implemented for the federation and the integration of the resulting federated resources into the different learning environments provided by the institutions to their students.