A remote over-internet hands-on laboratory

Information technology over the last few years has made tremendous leaps, reaching out to every aspect of modern society mainly business, entertainment and education. At the core of this information technology revolution has been the Internet with its vast reach into homes, offices, and classrooms making it a ready, easy and reliable tool for self-learning and technical resources. This has helped students pursue their academic interests, honing their skills from basic to advanced levels in an efficient and concise manner. Traditionally, the standard procedure for electrical engineering students to strengthen their theoretical concepts has been to attend various lab classes to gain valuable experience in design and implementation of classroom theories. However, there may be unavoidable circumstances in any engineering student´s life arising from social, professional or medical obligations that may prevent him from attending a theory or practical class. The idea of having a virtual laboratory that can be accessed over the Internet is a practical approach to solving this problem and help students to cope up and sharpen their practical skills. This paper throws light upon an on-going virtual laboratory program at the University of Texas at San Antonio that enables students to access and operate hardware and software based experiments physically connected to a web-server using remote desktop technologies conveniently from their PCs.