Practical experiences on building structured remote and virtual laboratories from the student's point of view

Abstract

Nowadays, the use of remote laboratories is a common feature in order to get students involved in practical experiences. This is particularly important in distance learning environment. The regular practice is to develop a particular laboratory, required by the student competence's curricula. Usually, this involves a lack of methodology or a standard procedure so, new developments must be done to include new laboratories, additionally so many “manual” procedures are required. RELATED (REmote LABoratory Extended) it's used to solve these issues. In this paper, a practical experience of the structured development process of a virtual laboratory, using RELATED framework, will be presented from the point of view of students. This virtual laboratory is a simple signal generator. This signal generator will be used to generate a reference position for the height of the ball of an electromagnetic levitation system in a control experiment. Finally, responses of surveys made by students will be presented, in order to get satisfaction results of using/development of virtual/remote laboratories using RELATED.