Developing the TriLab, a triple access mode (hands‐on, virtual, remote) laboratory, of a process control rig using LabVIEW and Joomla

Laboratory education is a core part of engineering curricula; engineering students generally prefer to work on something real. The classical mode and the oldest form of laboratory education is the hands‐on mode. Advances in information and communication technologies have contributed to the laboratory education by creating two new modes, the simulated (virtual) mode and the online controlled mode (remote). Recently, developments or utilizations of hybrid structures of two types (e.g., virtual and hands‐on, or remote and hands‐on) have been reported in the literature; however, until now there are no reports of hybrid structures of the three types together. This paper describes the technical development of a novel laboratory model that combines the three modes in one unifying software package, namely the TriLab, by using Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench (LabVIEW). It is shown that LabVIEW provides a single programming environment for developing all components of the TriLab. Furthermore, it is shown that the Joomla web content management system can be used as a solution for efficient deployment of a remote lab online portal on the top of the LabVIEW core software. The development of the TriLab using LabVIEW and Joomla for an Instrumentation and Control Engineering Laboratory rig is shown. The analysis of student survey is presented which has shown positive impact of the pedagogical utilization of the TriLab. This is the first paper which aims to provide engineering academics a generic architecture and software solutions to rapidly develop their own TriLab. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 21: 614–626, 2013