A Remote Engineering Lab for Collaborative Experimentation

Abstract

Collaborative working is a fundamental feature of contemporary organizations and is increasingly being supported by technology. Its main goal is to enable each of the collaborating group members to bring and to contribute ideas and knowledge to the group and then to share it with them in order to combine it into a final result. In engineering education, concepts taught through lectures are often complemented by lab experimentation, through which students can observe phenomena that are often difficult to explain by written material. This contribution presents a collaborative working environment for remote experimentation, which allows two students or more to conduct remote experiments at the same time as a team. The lab can be accessed via Internet from any place and at any time, and enables the students to obtain an automated help by either a human tutor or a rule-based e-tutor.