12 July 2007
Bilbao Campus
Last November, European experts in remote laboratories from Sweden, Germany or Austria gathered at the ?International Meeting on Professional Remote Laboratories?, and it was at this meeting that the idea of publishing the papers presented and discussed there came up. This meeting was attended by professionals in hw, sw, security, web services, web semantics, psychologists, sociologists, etc. This event was hosted by the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Deusto, which has the first and only laboratory of this kind designed with web 2.0 technology (http:// weblab.deusto.es). This laboratory has allowed over 300 students to complete lab assignments remotely through a PC, a PDA and also by means of mobile devices, as if they were present in the lab facilities at University.
Nowadays, experiments are such an essential part of education in science and engineering that, basically, nobody would think of adequate training in these disciplines without intensive laboratory practice. However, the implementation and maintenance of laboratories is a serious problem for universities regarding economy, organisation and education. This becomes even more evident in the case of expensive or dangerous equipment. A solution to these problems (or a way to ease them) is the design of Remote Laboratories or WebLabs, which allow students/customers to complete lab assignments remotely from their home or from any other place with Internet connection.
Obviously, this involves certain restrictions but there is an increasing number of WebLabs in different areas. The first ones appeared in 1996 in the area of microelectronics (Jesús del Álamo at MIT), although it was in 2000 that they reached their real peak. At present, there are WebLabs in a wide range of areas such as electronics, robotics, industrial control, mechanics, automation, telescopes, electronic microscopes, etc. Its common characteristic is that they can be not only remote-controlled but also wholly controlled using an adequate application and an Internet connection.
A remote laboratory is always available (24 hours a day, everyday), which enables students to better distribute their time (as they can access whenever they want to); it facilitates the management of traditional laboratories (there is no need for constant supervision by a lecturer or a person in charge); it promotes collaboration between countries (in Spain, students from Latin America would be able to access the laboratories at night); it encourages students? significant and autonomous learning and it provides comprehensive distance training in technical areas (for example, this allows to reduce the barrier between the rural environment and the university).
Despite these opportunities, there are also many challenges: technological challenges (is technology the most important characteristic of a WebLab?), educational challenges (is a WebLab useful from an educational point of view?), deployment (can a WebLab be installed in another university/educational establishment?), accessibility (can a remote laboratory be accessed by people with special needs?), software (can a WebLab be designed as a web 2.0 service? Can/must plug-ins be avoided? etc), collaborative work, etc.
Apart from these opportunities and challenges ? some of which are already important separately ? there are many different actors involved in the development, maintenance and deployment of a remote laboratory: students, researchers, lecturers, educators, institutions, technical services and even governments and countries. This makes the development of really useful WebLabs more difficult.
At present, many research groups worldwide are faced with these questions and they try to find a response to offer society a new tool that may provide its citizens with the best and most adequate training.
This book deals with all these issues from different perspectives and with the collaboration of authors from different countries (Romania, Sweden, Germany, Portugal, Austria, Brazil, Italy and Spain). According to Nickerson and Ma, authors of one of the main articles on Remote Laboratories (published by ACM), this is the first book focused on the area of remote laboratories in an exclusive and multidisciplinary way, which makes it especially relevant.
