Remote laboratories versus virtual and real laboratories

During the last decade the exponential expansion of the Internet has had an enormous impact on the tertiary education sector. The new technology has brought a significant improvement in communication within the academic community and has improved students' learning experiences. However, one of the most important factors in forming the engineering graduate qualities is the practical component of the engineering curriculum. Many software packages have been developed for the simulation of real experiments and although very useful, none of them are as effective as learning from undertaking real experimental work. Remote laboratories offer all the advantages of the new technology, but are often a poor replacement for real laboratory work. In this paper we present a remote laboratory called NetLab, developed at the University of South Australia. With its specially designed graphical user interface it offers students all the advantages of a real laboratory environment.