SIG Remote Labs and Online Experimentation

Remote Labs and Online Experimentation offer a rich opportunity to learners by allowing them to control real equipment at distance in order to conduct scientific investigations. Remote Labs and Online Experimentation build on top of numerous emerging technologies for supporting remote experiments and promoting the immersion of the learner in virtual environments recreating the real experience.

The European project FORGE has initiated the use of next-generation FIRE (Future Internet Research and Experimentation) facilities for teaching and learning purposes via interactive learning resources, such as eBooks. The overall objective of FORGE is to introduce the FIRE experimental facilities into the eLearning community, in order to promote the concept of experimentally driven research in education by using experiments as an interactive learning and training channel for both students and professionals by raising the accessibility and usability of FIRE facilities.

The European project Go-Lab aims at promoting inquiry learning with online labs at school. In addition to offering in its federated repository virtual labs and access to scientific data, it also enables to embed remote labs in inquiry learning spaces which can be shared as rich open educational resources. To enable personalization and reuse, Go-lab promotes the sharing of remote labs as services following the smart device specifications tentatively standardized by the IEEE P1876 Working Group on Networked Smart Learning Objects for Online Laboratories.

Goals

The main goal of the SIG is to drive and promote remote labs and online experimentation and to offer the technologies that can help stakeholders build experimental infrastructures and use them across different domains. The SIG aims at creating an open community and ecosystem where a wide range of educational resources and different setups for scientific experimentation are shared among the community members. The SIG also aims at developing best pedagogical and technical practices to broaden the adoption of remote labs and online experimentation in the teacher and provider communities.

Events

Workshop: “Building Remote Labs for Online Scientific Experimentation”, collocated with the World Engineering Education Forum (WEEF), the International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Learning (ICL) and the International Conference on Engineering Pedagogy (IGIP). The workshop took place on September 20th, 2015 in Florence, Italy. Representatives from the FORGE and Go-Lab projects presented the methodologies and tools that have been developed by these two projects for building remote labs. The full programme of the event is available here.

Chairs

John Domingue (Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, UK)

Prof. John Domingue is the Director of the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) and a Professor of Computer Science at The Open University. John is interested in how semantic technology can be used to create an Internet composed of billions of services which are created, managed and used by billions of users in a highly dynamic fashion. He is also working on new educational platforms embedding world-class internet experimental infrastructures into iBooks and supporting the maintenance of healthy lifestyles through sensors, smartphones and semantic technologies. John is the coordinator of the FORGE project.

Denis Gillet (School of Engineering, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne – EPFL, Switzerland)

Dr. Denis Gillet is the Director of the Coordination and Interaction Systems Group (React) and a member of the Center for Digital Education (CEDE) at EPFL. His current research interests include Technologies Enhanced Learning (TEL), Human Computer Interaction (HCI), Human Devices Interaction (HDI) and Optimal Coordination of Complex and Distributed Systems. In this framework, he is promoting the integration of social media platforms and online labs as cyber physical systems in STEM education. Denis is Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies (TLT) and the Technical Coordinator of the Go-Lab project.

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