Abstract
Remote Laboratories are widely used in the education of stem subjects. While the first generation of remote labs was based on individually developed local experiments with an integrated web interface, the next generation combined multiple experiments in a remote laboratory management system, making it possible to share whole experiments between institutions. At the same time, with cheap hardware available more and more experiments are conducted by the students at home. The sharing of experiments is already a step towards a more prosperous learning environment. The next step is to collaboratively develop and operate experiments by offering parts of experiments that are coupled over the internet to execute the whole experiment. This form of remotely coupled experiments allows for better collaboration between different institutions and also has benefits within a single institution. By remixing the components, the curriculum can be adapted to changing teaching scenarios, especially when considering that components from other institutions might be used. Also, extensive or expensive apparatuses can be hosted by the institution while more mobile parts are given to the students creating a hybrid take-home lab which is an improvement compared to an all virtual or all remote laboratory in terms of immersion.
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Notes
- 1.
Another option to follow would be to have a gateway for browsers. We discourage making such an architectural choice because this increases the complexity of the whole system and subdivides laboratory devices into two classes: “web-based-devices” and “native devices”. With this separation, it is not easy to move and reuse code between those two classes. This could ultimately make the implementation of edge computing harder and will all in all negatively influence scalability.
- 2.
E.g. there is the proposal of the WebTransport [12] protocol.
- 3.
Keep in mind that in practice, this will usually be implemented as a subsystem, consisting of multiple servers responsible for identity and user management, data storage, booking, accounting, etc.
- 4.
A user-specific laboratory device will be visible and usable by only a single user as opposed to a semi-public or public device
- 5.
There may be many more additional devices like an edge computed(i.e., on the user device executed) Finite State Machine, a source code editor, experiment interaction elements, and so on.
- 6.
Where authentication solves the problem of proving who is interacting with the system, while authorization defines the mechanism which is used to determine what a specific user is allowed to do
- 7.
A popular standard for these tokens are the JSON Web Tokens(JWT), but in the last years several alternatives have been developed
- 8.
Since IEEE 1876 [8] is using xAPI for the activity registration and this API often came up in our literature research, we assume that xAPI will be operational in the foreseeable future.
- 9.
In the I2C protocol, clock stretching is possible, i.e., the slave will drive the clock low until it is ready to transmit data. However, other protocols like SPI will not allow for such things and use a fixed clock speed.
- 10.
The registration is tied to a unique user; however, we discuss security-relevant data elements and behavior in a later subsection.
- 11.
To increase availability, this might be implemented in a way that allows specifying a device-based on properties or tags instead of selecting a unique device. This will allow postponing the selection of a unique device to the start of the experiment
- 12.
Have a look at the OAuth Protocol for a guideline to secure implementation.
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Acknowledgements
This work is partly funded by the Stiftung Innovation in der Hochschullehre, Treuhandstiftung in Trägerschaft der Toepfer Stiftung gGmbH in the project Cross-Lab [20] (project number FBM2020-VA-182-3-00590).
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Nau, J., Henke, K., Streitferdt, D. (2022). New Ways for Distributed Remote Web Experiments. In: Auer, M.E., Pester, A., May, D. (eds) Learning with Technologies and Technologies in Learning. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 456. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04286-7_13
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