SURVEYING AND INVESTIGATION OF REMOTE LABORATORY CONCEPTS, TECHNOLOGIES, AND PLATFORMS FOR STEM PROGRAMS
Sam Houston State University (UNITED STATES)
About this paper:
Conference name: 15th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies
Dates: 3-5 July, 2023
Location: Palma, Spain
Abstract:
The improvement of the internet-based services such as IoT, Industry 4.0, and Web 5.0 Remote Lab concepts, virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR) and the speed of internet opened new avenues to offer remote and/or remotely controlled laboratory experiments. Traditionally, the laboratory experiments in STEM programs have been conducted in physical laboratory environments required student presence during the actual laboratory sessions. In the remote lab concept, the physical laboratory equipment can be accessed via remote to conduct lab experiments. Depends on the setup of remote lab environment, an interactive lab experiment offered to students where lab equipment (devices, instruments) can be accessed via web-based servers. The users can send control commands through web-based server to execute commands for their experiments and collect or visualize results without being near the actual lab equipment. Remote lab access still offers performing physical actions such us controlling with hands, pressing buttons, speaking to microphones, and turning knobs etc. With the integration of cameras and sensors, the users can receive feedback and visualize the activities for the lab experiments. Moreover, remote laboratory concept has been one of the important research items during the Covid-19 pandemic where most of the institutions moved their classes to online and/or remote modalities. The impacts of Covid-19 pandemics were unexpected and the preparation for the remote lab concepts were minimal where face-to-face laboratory experiments have been common among STEM programs. For those academic programs who were not prepared for remote and online laboratory delivery have struggled to find out ways on how to deliver traditional face-to-face laboratory experiments to their students remotely where major equipment was necessary to utilize. Recently, researchers and companies have been investigating and working on remote laboratory concepts and integration to the curriculum. The popularity of remote lab is increasing and the improved speed of internet but still doe does not have much attention and knowledge about this area. The objective to this paper is to find the best current resource available for remote learning lab for STEM majors. The goal is to survey programs, company, or university resource exchange to find the best optimal sources for remote learning through remote lab, via doing it through the computers and doing control systems via the laboratories.Keywords:
Remote lab, STEM.