Assisting students in online experimentation

With the advancement of technology and universities' aspiration to reach more students including students studying in distance mode, remote laboratories are gaining popularity and becoming a common feature of STEM programs. Remote laboratories make laboratory equipment more accessible to both on-campus and off-campus students. However, assistance to students experimenting outside the scheduled supervised classes is hard to provide and therefore usually not available in remote laboratories. With the advancements in software engineering and intelligent systems, it is a natural step forward to develop intelligent tutoring systems that will assist students in online experimentation when a human tutor is not available. In this article, we present our work in this direction.