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

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.

[1]  Nourdine Aliane,et al.  Limitations of Remote Laboratories in Control Engineering Education , 2010, Int. J. Online Eng..

[2]  Luís Gomes,et al.  Current Trends in Remote Laboratories , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics.

[3]  Manuel Castro,et al.  Remote laboratories for electrical & electronic subjects in new engineering grades , 2011, 2011 Promotion and Innovation with New Technologies in Engineering Education (FINTDI 2011).

[4]  Manuel Castro,et al.  Remote labs as learning services in the educational arena , 2011, 2011 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON).

[5]  Daniel Moraes,et al.  Design and Implementation Issues for Modern Remote Laboratories , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies.

[6]  Sebastián Dormido,et al.  Development of an XML-Based Lab for Remote Control Experiments on a Servo Motor , 2005 .

[7]  S. Dormido,et al.  Magnetic levitation system: a virtual lab in "easy Java simulation" , 2004, Proceedings of the 2004 American Control Conference.