Student and staff experiences with international collaboration in the remote laboratory NetLab

Remote laboratories increasingly have been used in engineering and science education as a complementary tool to traditional proximal laboratories. In some cases, they replace real laboratories to enable students' access to otherwise unavailable or unique equipment and facilities, or to expose students to a unique educational experience. Such a unique experience is an opportunity to collaborate over the Internet with other students either in the same city, the same country or internationally. The latter case adds an extra dimension to the development of communication and collaboration skills required to conduct technical experiments on real components, instruments and systems. Challenges may arise due to different culture, language and learning habits. This paper reports on the authors' and their students' experiences with international collaboration in the remote laboratory NetLab. These experiences are compared with feedback provided by domestic students and observation of their performance by supervising academics. Preliminary recommendations are formulated for effective international collaboration in remote laboratories.