A federation of VISIR remote laboratories through the PILAR Project
This paper describes how a new Erasmus Plus project, PILAR, (Platform Integration of Laboratories based on the Architecture of visiR), is being developed and how the startup of the partnership and the project is reinforcing the VISIR (Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality) network and the Special Interest Group of VISIR under the Global Online Laboratory Consortium (GOLC) of the International Association of Online Engineering (IAOE). The Spanish University for Distance Education (UNED) coordinates the project that aims to federate the existing (or new) VISIR systems in order to use the resources more effectively and in a more efficient way, making transparent to the final user the election of the shared resources.
Spreading Remote Laboratory Scope Through a Federation of Nodes: VISIR Case
New social learning demands are fostered by continuous learning culture and self-learning environments. This demanding scenario requires ubiquitous educational environments without temporal restrictions. For these reasons, educational institutions increasingly rely on remote laboratories (RLs) as educational tools in order to provide real-world experiences in science education. RLs present several advantages to students which have been widely reported. Although quite powerful, RLs have intrinsically some drawbacks. While some of these drawbacks are inherent to the remote interaction and cannot be addressed, such as the impossibility to provide manual skill, many others derive from technical constraints. Traditionally, the approach to deal with these limitations on the performance is based on the redesign and improvement of the RL. However, due to the number of operating systems, an alternative approach is open for a RL: Virtual Instruments System in Reality (VISIR). VISIR is a RL designed to construct and test electrical/electronic circuits. The possibility of building a federation of VISIR nodes emerged from the actual needs detected by the VISIR community. In this paper, we describe a federation of VISIR nodes reporting the architecture implemented for the federation and the integration of the resulting federated resources into the different learning environments provided by the institutions to their students.
Design, implementation and use of a remote network lab as an aid to support teaching computer network
This article presents the design, implementation and use of a remote network lab as an aid to support teaching computer networks. The purpose is to enable students complement the learning of the theory with practical experimentation in networking devices from any room with Internet access. Unlike the current solutions based on mainly emulation and simulation software, the remote laboratory presented is a server and a Web application that allows the students to interact remotely with commercial network devices, such as cutting-edge switches, routers and firewall that are widely used in the workplace. This proposal reduces the expenses of installing new laboratories and moving students who are far from their classrooms. The use of the remote laboratory has been compared, by means of a quasi- experiment, to the use of traditional network labs with seniors students of computing engineering. The outcomes show a similarity between both approaches, turning the remote network lab an effective tool to support teaching computer network.