Abstract:

The integration of computers and new information technologies offers a large number of possibilities. In the field of education, the Internet increases flexibility in the educational process regarding physical spaces and timetables. Furthermore, web-based tools make possible to assist and encourage students with motor disabilities that are registered in engineering programs.
The development of Internet applications has increased during the last years by university research and teaching staff members. This is the case of virtual laboratories that allow access to simulated processes on a computer or remote laboratories that permit to remote users to perform real experiments. Both on-line labs have the common characteristic of helping the students in the learning process anytime and anywhere propelled by the rapid growth of networking infrastructures.
In university-level engineering education is sometimes difficult for students to establish a relationship between the theory lecture content and its practical use with real systems. With the work carried out in the laboratories with physical systems it is possible to link both sides of the learning. In this way virtual and remote laboratories can be used to illustrate the relationship between theoretical contents and the real systems. They have been used in several engineering courses like circuit theory, control design, power electronics or design of digital electronic systems.
In some cases, Matlab has been used as the core of the web-based laboratory. In other cases, LabView has been chosen. In both cases, a plug-in is required to launch Matlab or LabView on the remote machine from within a Web browser. The virtual and remote laboratory called SLVIRVI, from the Spanish (Servicio de Laboratorio Virtual e Instrumentación Remota Via Internet), has been designed and built in LabView 8.2 at the University of Málaga as an Innovation in Education project.
SLVIRVI can be used by the teacher during the lectures or when the students have doubts and also allows a widespread use of the equipment since the students can repeat the practical work many times without a fixed timetable.
The team in charge of SLVIRVI it is composed by Members of three departments, Electronic Technology, Electrical Engineering and Automatic Control and System Engineering. So, SLVIRVI faces heterogeneous experimental settings in several subjects of different academic disciplines like automatic control, electrical measurement and electronic digital design.
An analysis of the use of SLVIRVI from the point of view of students and teachers has been carried out and it is presented in this paper. The opinion of students has been captured by a survey carried out at the end of the term.

The content of the paper can be summed up in four points:
1.- The justification of using SLVIRVI in an engineering education environment.
2.-A brief description of the main features that accomplish the web-based laboratory.
3.- The way of use of SLVIRVI at the University of Málaga.
4.- An analysis of the opinions given by students and teachers who have used SLVIRVI reaching some conclusions oriented to improve its usefulness in the future.

Keywords:

remote laboratory, virtual laboratory, educational tool, engineering education, e-learning.