Three key issues should be addressed to enable universities to deliver engineers who have a solid documented laboratory experience enabling them to design goods and services complying with the requirements of a sustainable society. First, introduce learning objectives of engineering instructional laboratories in courses including laboratory components. Second, implement individual student assessment. Third, introduce free access to online experimental resources as a supplement to the equipment in traditional laboratories. Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH) in Sweden and the University of South Australia (UniSA) have created online laboratory workbenches for electrical experiments that mimic traditional ones by combining virtual and physical reality. Online workbenches not only supplement traditional ones, but they can also be used for low-cost individual assessment. BTH has started a project disseminating the BTH workbench concept, The Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality (VISIR) Open Laboratory Platform, and invites other universities to set up replicas and participate in further development and standardization. Further, online workbenches offer additional learning possibilities. UniSA has started a project where students located in different countries can perform experiments together as a way to enhance the participants' intercultural competence. This paper discusses online laboratory workbenches and their role in an engineering education appropriate for a sustainable society.

Remote Laboratories or WebLabs constitute a first-order didactic resource in engineering faculties. However, in many cases, they lack a proper software design, both in the client and server side, which degrades their quality and academic usefulness. This paper presents the main characteristics of a Remote Laboratory, analyzes the software technologies to implement the client and server sides in a WebLab, and correlates these technologies with the characteristics to facilitate the selection of a technology to implement a WebLab. The results obtained suggest the adoption of a Service Oriented Laboratory Architecture-based approach for the design of future Remote Laboratories so that client-agnostic Remote Laboratories and Remote Laboratory composition are enabled. The experience with the real Remote Laboratory, WebLab-Deusto, is also presented.

Remote laboratories give students the opportunity of experimenting in STEM by using the Internet to control and measure an experimental setting. Remote laboratories are increasingly used in the classroom to complement, or substitute for, hands-on laboratories, so it is important to know its learning value. While many authors approach this question through qualitative analyses, this paper reports a replicated quantitative study that evaluates the teaching performance of one of these resources, the virtual instrument systems in reality (VISIR) remote laboratory. VISIR, described here, is the most popular remote laboratory for basic analog electronics. This paper hypothesizes that use of a remote laboratory has a positive effect on students' learning process. This report analyzes the effect of the use of VISIR in five different groups of students from two different academic years (2013-2014 and 2014-2015), with three teachers and at two educational levels. The empirical experience focuses on Ohm's Law. The results obtained are reported using a pretest and post-test design. The tests were carefully designed and analyzed, and their reliability and validity were assessed. The analysis of knowledge test question results shows that the post-test scores are higher that the pretest. The difference is significant according to Wilcoxon test (p < 0.001), and produces a Cohen effect size of 1.0. The VISIR remote laboratory's positive effect on students' learning processes indicates that remote laboratories can produce a positive effect in students' learning if an appropriate activity is used.

In this paper, we propose a novel approach in hardware and software architecture design for implementation of remote laboratories for automatic control. In our contribution, we show the solution with flexible connectivity at back-end, providing features of multipurpose usage with different types of experimental devices, and fully configurable client side application at front-end. The physical setup and communication principles of hardware architecture are based on two types of devices: the programmable logic controllers and industrial network routers. The user interface of client application is designed as a Web page, powered by optimized JavaScript, using the sophisticated on-the-fly content generation. To prove the suitability of the architecture, we compare it with other existing approaches of remote laboratory design. We evaluate their benefits and weaknesses, especially in terms of expense, implementation difficulty, and versatility of usage. In this paper, we also show a detailed example of remote laboratory implementation based on new architecture for thermo-optical educational system and provide three other examples of developed remote laboratories. Evaluation of remote laboratory usage and its benefits is provided to demonstrate the learning value of proposed architecture in education process.

Remote laboratories are software and hardware tools that allow students to remotely access real equipment located in universities. The integration of remote laboratories in learning tools (learning management systems, content management systems, or personal learning environments) has been achieved to integrate remote laboratories as part of the learning curricula. A cross-institutional initiative called gateway4labs has been created to perform this integration extensible to multiple remote laboratories in multiple learning tools. This contribution focuses on describing this initiative and, in particular, how opening it to public systems (where users do not need to be registered) produces new technical and organizational challenges due to the public availability of labs. In addition, this contribution shows integrations of systems that were not previously addressed in this initiative, such as PhET or ViSH, as well as a new approach for integrating supported laboratories in external specifications such as the smart device one through OpenSocial.

Remote laboratories have been in use for 25 years now. Whereas several learning oriented meta-analyses exist, validated and agreed-upon tools for assessing the user experience are not readily available. The present paper fills this gap by designing and evaluating a questionnaire focused on the needs of remote labs developers and educators using them. Building from pre-existing tools, a first version of the User eXperience Questionnaire (UXQ version 20190308) was designed to contain four scales, usability, utility, satisfaction and immersion. A total of 180 completed responses were collected from two different remote labs (VISIR and FPGA), in different campuses and in different courses to evaluate the questionnaire. The questionnaire was analyzed in terms of reliability, using Cronbach’s alpha and McDonalds’ omega, and validity of construct, through factor analysis. The reliability of the questionnaire and its four subscales is acceptable, but its validity should be improved. Accordingly, the questionnaire was redesigned to obtain the User eXperience Questionnaire (UXQ version 20191126), which includes three scales: usability, utility and immersion, and three questions per scale. This questionnaire was assessed using the same data. Reliability coefficients are above 0.7 and construct validity is satisfactory. A new questionnaire to evaluate the user experience in remote laboratories has been designed and validated. The questionnaire, now renamed as UXQ4RL v. 1.0, is presented and made available in this paper.