Interoperability platform for virtual and remote laboratories

Abstract

This communication describes the interoperability platform that has been developed at the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) to integrate the access to different virtual and remote laboratories. Up to eleven laboratories that belong to the GilabViR group of interest in virtual and remote laboratories in our University have been analyzed to generate a set of specifications and develop the architecture and the applications that would allow its access through the university LMS system. Although the current LMS platform (Atenea) is implemented over Moodle 1.9, the new modules have been developed using Moodle 2.2.1 given that the migration to this version will be done in the next months. The interoperability platform defines new Moodle modules that allow the interconnection between the LMS system and a set of laboratories and provide the intrinsic LMS features (user identification, activity recording, educational materials repository, ...). There are modules that allow the interaction with a web service interface giving access to the laboratory, with Java applet virtual laboratories and others that make possible the link with LabView based remote laboratories, all of them with recording of experiment parameters in SQL databases placed in the experiment servers.