The role of online labs in the European e-Science Infrastructure

Scientific disciplines nowadays benefits from e-learning technologies and online laboratories. This allows engaging students more effectively and achieving better learning outcomes. However, even the most recent online laboratorial solutions lack in offering some valuable capabilities, such as the cooperative dimension, which promises to boost the students' involvement and their interactions with peers and teachers. According to the most recent guidelines from the scientific scenario as well as from the European Community, with the e-Science Infrastructure initiative, we propose in this paper a collaborative, hierarchical, multi-videoconferencing approach based on WebRTC that offers an optical microscope located at the biology faculty of our university as an online laboratory equipment. The proposed platform has been tested with students from a local high-school in their curricular biology activities, thus highlighting the feasibility of the proposed approach as well as its pedagogical effectiveness. The first implemented prototype and the proposed didactic protocol are also presented.