Framework for a Multipurpose Remotely Accessible Laboratory for Education

Abstract

Hands-on exercises are an important aspect of students’ education and they have a positive effect on their overall knowledge retention rates. With the Covid-19 pandemic on one hand, and the ever-increasing number of new students on the other, in-person computer laboratories are no longer a feasible option for the implementation of such practical lessons.The introduction of remote learning laboratories is one potential solution to both of these problems. However, existing remote laboratory implementations only focus on either a single scientific field, are not versatile in terms of supported infrastructure, orsupport only limited runtime options for the software to be used as part of the exercises. To overcome these issues, we have devised a remote laboratory framework consisting of 8 fundamental feature requirements which would allow flexible use in different fields of study, while at the same time enabling easy extension with existing and new simulation software. We discuss different implementation routes and report on the progress that we have already made in terms of setting up such a remote laboratory for the needs of our courses. We conclude that while most features can be implemented with existing open source software,challenges arise in terms of providing a self-service portal from which students can on-demand deploy resources.