A New and Open Model to Share Laboratories on the Internet

A new model for sharing real laboratories on the Internet and creating a virtual on-line laboratory has been developed and validated in the field of electronic measurements. Testing theories through practice is an important approach to scientific teaching, and appropriate solutions have not yet been found to support this activity in Web-based education. The on-line laboratory addresses this issue. It allows the execution via Web of real experiments and manages concurrency among users who remotely drive instruments and carry out experiments. The experimental setup can be distributed in different real laboratories, spread on a wide-area network, and controlled by local computers. Users can practice through the network and transparently to the actual locations of the devices under test in a multiuser concurrent way. The proposed paradigm increases the possibility of practice in both academic and industrial education and enriches the current experience in e-learning.