Impact of students' preferences on the design of online laboratories

Abstract

Online laboratories have been effective in bridging the gaps between theory and practice particularly in situations not covered by traditional hands on laboratories. Together with secondary school students we aim to develop 3 laboratory setups including a novel approach to seamlessly plug these setups to the cloud and make them available to other peers. Students will strongly be involved in the research which might illuminate new insights into the requirements of the young learners and teachers using and developing these laboratories. This paper proposes a novel approach to develop software components that might ease the provision of laboratory equipment in online portals. The anticipated results of this research include better understanding of students' preferences for the design of online laboratories. Based on these preferences, novel plug-play-share software components will be developed including a set of instruction how to use those software components on a large scale.