A Modular and Extensible Remote Electronic Laboratory

Abstract

The remote control of instrumentation is not enough to set up a remote laboratory. Several pedagogical, technical, and structural issues must be faced to obtain modular and scalable systems. This paper reports our experience in developing a remote laboratory system to teach electronics to information engineering students. Our target is to develop proper architectures and tools, to obtain an easy management of the system and a better pedagogical effectiveness. The approach used in describing the compo-nents of online experiments facilitates the upgrade of the laboratory and the sharing of experiments, defined as stan-dard learning objects. A particular attention has been paid to pedagogical issues. The main problems being investigated are: the lack of the support that students used to have in traditional labs, the reduced interaction with the objects under test, and the necessity of providing feedback to the experimenters.