Universities and educational organizations or institutions, when designing any electronics course, trust in experimentation through laboratory practices in order to build successful cross-curricular capabilities and capacities. In electronics courses there is a need to have practical experiences, the benefits of electronics laboratory practices are widely known for professionals and necessary for any person who seeks for a broad comprehension of the real-time performance beyond the ideal modelling. Therefore, when designing any electronics course, the laboratory practices are one of the pillars on which the learning is established. Distance education has become widespread in the last decade and has fostered lifelong learning and continuing education patterns, allowing access to learning resources at any time and from everywhere. It has been possible thanks to the internet development and technologies associated with learning tools for a new teaching pedagogy. To support life-long learning and students' autonomous learning activities, remote experimentation has become a challenge in electronics courses; rather, the way the universities and educational organizations or institutions deliver remote experimentation to students in distance learning environments, has become a challenge. Nowadays, there is an extensive variety for providing theoretical contents in distance learning (videos, documents, tutorials, scaffolding activities, peer-to-peer reviews, forums, etc.) to students. These tools, by an efficiently and appropriate selection from professors and use from students, can complement or replace successfully in-person education, even they can reach some aspects that in-person education cannot achieve. Unfortunately, practical issues are not as developed as theoretical ones are. A first approach to this problem is clearly the use of simulators and virtual labs. Although, they are still a bit far from providing to student the real performance and features of equipment under real-life operation conditions. The major challenge is the provision of laboratory working online along with the theoretical contents in a massive context.

The creation and maintenance of a virtual campus is a task that not only implies the deployment of sophisticated hardware and software but also requires considerable effort in the integration of the main university management systems with the chosen teaching tools present in the campus. Such integration requires the definition of a range of services tailored for the different user profiles. Hence, it has been necessary to develop a management environment for the virtual campus that enables it to be manipulated and controlled in an efficient manner where new services (above and beyond the basic e-Learning platform tools) can be integrated in a seamless fashion. The implementation of these services should guarantee a large degree of interoperability among virtual learning environments, VLEs and tools. To this end, some of these services have been implemented using the IMS Enterprise standard. This standard essentially contributes to the organization of a given e-Learning platform in terms of users, courses and roles therein; leaving to one side the formalization of other services more specific to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) together with the current technological framework.

Much as happened with open software, there has been a global attitude shift in the education community toward the open sharing of educational courses and resources. As the largest public distance education university in Spain, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) has had a clear commitment to open learning and content since its very beginnings. Its open courseware (OCW) portal was started in 2006 and has received several prizes for its innovative content. During this period, the OCW materials were used to supplement standard teaching in a variety of educational applications, among them induction and competence transfer courses. These initiatives have been used as a starting point for a comprehensive open educational resource (OER) policy at UNED. Efforts to foster OER initiatives are collected in the project called UNED Abierta (Open UNED). UNED currently publishes its open resources in various platforms and formats, such as iTunes U, MOOC, and OpenCourseWare. This paper presents UNED's experience in OER and describes how it is tackling the new challenges in OER creation and distribution.