-preprint - Collaborative Remote Laboratories in Engineering Education: Challenges and Visions

Remote Laboratories appear to be natural tools for teaching collaborative work skills, because they offer interesting perspectives for social and collaborative learning from multiple and distributed locations. However, remote labs separate users from the real workbench and their traditional tools. Accordingly teleoperating remote lab equipment requires a sufficient degree of interactivity and vividness to give the learner the impression of actually being in the lab. Effective use of collaborative remote labs is based on a feeling of shared space, time and reality, determined by technological and human factors. We will review related concepts and discuss lessons learned from own research and prototype development. New developments involve the use of Mixed Reality techniques and open perspectives for future research. Introduction Remote laboratories have been an important topic of research during recent years, and it is not difficult to find publications that address this area. The developments in Internet technology, notably the World Wide Web and its associated technologies (hypertext, web browsers, etc.) provided the basis for the evolution in remote experimentation from the beginning of the 90’s, although the basic ideas are much older. Remotely operated apparatuses have long been desired for use in dangerous or inaccessible environments such as radiation sites, marine and space exploration. For example Goertz and Thompson (1952) developed the first telemanipulator in 1945 for the remote safe handling of radioactive isotopes. See Sheridan (1992) for an excellent review of the extensive literature on teleoperating remote systems. Although remote laboratories have proven valuable for a more efficient exploitation of laboratory resources and can be shared among participants from different places, there has been less research on collaborative applications. We believe that remote laboratories are ideal tools for teaching distributed collaborative work skills, because they offer perspectives of shaping teaching 1 For a literature survey see Ma & Nickerson (2006). scenarios which are close to real distributed engineering team work. Likewise, remote labs can be shared by many institutions and students worldwide. This may promote the interaction of faculty and students across laboratory-based and technology-oriented subjects in different countries. It is widely believed that collaborative experiences are powerful drivers of cognitive processes and can significantly enhance learning efficiency. The benefits of collaborative learning are widely researched and advocated throughout literature (Lehtinen 2003). Regardless of the varying theoretical emphasis in different approaches on collaborative learning (e.g. social constructivism), research clearly indicates that in many (not all) cases students learn more effectively through collaborative interaction with others. This motivates us to prepare remote labs for collaborative learning and to use them in distributed teaching scenarios together with simulation tools, hands-on laboratories and practical workshops. Our study suggests that there is a strong demand for research that seeks to create such a mix, where collaborative remote labs can play a significant role. This emphasis on collaboration adds new technical requirements to the design of remote laboratories. As a whole, there is a need to improve the usability of collaborative remote laboratory tools because otherwise learners may quickly get frustrated and stop working with it. In the following sections we describe these issues in depth. We start with an analysis of laboratory environments, using it as an introduction to work out the characteristics of remote labs in comparison to other types of tools, such as hands-on and virtual labs. New results from collaborative work research are presented and we discuss implications for engineering education in general and lab courses in particular. Effective use of collaborative remote labs is based on a feeling of shared space, time and reality (presence), determined by technological and human factors. We will review related concepts and discuss lessons learned from our own research and prototype development. Before concluding, a case study is presented. This recent work involves the use of Mixed Reality (as opposed to ‘pure’ virtual reality) techniques to support seamless collaborative work between remote sites. We describe this and identify areas for future research. Section 1: Remote laboratories in engineering education In literature, numerous definitions of remote lab environments can be found (e.g. Bencomo 2004, Ma & Nickerson 2006). But nevertheless a universally applicable definition and mutual understanding of what exactly is meant when talking about a remote laboratory does not exist: the terms remote lab, web-lab, virtual lab, tele-lab, collaboratory or online lab are often used synonymously and inconsistently and in some publications there isn’t even a clear distinction between those different types of tools. Researchers (e.g. Ma & Nickerson 2006) have convincingly argued that this confusion makes it difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of remote experimentation and its related technologies. The debate is also complex for other reasons. Almost all laboratories in science and engineering are mediated by computers. Accordingly, there are many lab devices nowadays which are operated via a computer based interface anyway. In such cases, the nature of accessing the lab equipment may not differ much, whether the student is collocated with the physical apparatus or is interacting remotely via a virtual interaction panel. Although it might be fruitful talking about the relative extent of remoteness or virtuality, it is also important initially to establish a proper taxonomy for later study. Thus, in order to ascertain what is actually meant by the aforementioned types of labs, we will in the first step differentiate between hands-on and virtual (simulated), local and distributed, and mono-user or multi-user environments. The following criteria allow us to establish a first orientation (see fig 1): 1. The nature of the lab equipment (physical or virtual). 2. The access-mode to perform a task (local or distant access). Figure 1: Laboratory environments As regards these criteria, the general idea behind a remote laboratory is the ability to access physical laboratories or workbenches from distant sites by using a suitable communication infrastructure. In a remote laboratory the user (alone or as part of a team) and the laboratory setup are at different locations and participants work through a computer that is connected online to a real device. The typical scenario in education, for example, corresponds to learners that use the web to access the lab from their homes. On most occasions, their objective consists of carrying out a work assignment that is part of their study activities. However, it should be stressed that remote experimentation is not necessarily an educational activity. In industry, as well as in research centres, the remote control of devices through the Internet represents a unique opportunity to solve engineers’ and scientists’ needs to access apparatus or machinery from a distance. Another possible scenario consists of an institution that provides remote access to some form of equipment that may be too expensive to be acquired by an individual or even a small company (Eikas et al. 2002). Remote labs can be a useful complementary educational resource to hands-on labs, as they allow monitoring or supervising a running experiment remotely. To get rid of geographic proximity restrictions has far reaching consequences for education. Networked facilities can be shared by students working from distant locations, 24 hours a day. But experimentation in situ with a plant or real object cannot be totally replaced by remote resources. Hands-on labs, where students operate a real plant or manipulate real objects while being directly collocated with the tools and objects in the same room will remain existential in engineering education, because learning experiences in reallife situations are not only a key prerequisite for learning psychomotor skills, but also relevant for understanding theoretical concepts. The psychologist Piaget drew attention to this phenomenon long ago, when he described how cognitive development is generally rooted in the tactile interaction with the objects in their environment (Piaget 1963). Accordingly there is no doubt that hands-on labs and workshops play an important role in engineering education. Nersessian (1991) even goes so far as to claim that “hands-on experience is at the heart of science learning”, and Ma & Nickerson (2001) emphasize that hands-on labs are important initially to establish the reality of remote laboratories or the accuracy of simulations for later study. Accordingly, the effectiveness of remote labwork is seen to be correlated to the directness of its link to the real world (Cooper et al. 2002). As remote labs are always networked to physical objects, so called virtual laboratories are non-physical tools. Actually, they are simulated labs. Consequently, a virtual laboratory can be defined as a computer-based model of a real-life lab. They can be realized as local or distributed applications. Because a virtual lab consists of a computer program, which can easily be operated simultaneously by more than one user, it is at the same time a multi-user environment ready for collaborative lab work. The most important educational aspect of virtual labs is the reduced risk associated with operator errors, and the opportunity to experiment and practise without being exposed to hazards. That is why the virtual lab very often acts as an antechamber (e.g. for prelab assignment) to the real-world experiment, allowing the application and testing of theoretical knowledge and skills in a safe environment before trying out the same a