A Multi-purpose Architecture for Collaborative Web Labs

Laboratory classes are integral part of scientific education, but they are resource-intensive, imposing significant logistic constraints upon the curriculum. An option to reduce these burdens is to implement remote access laboratory classes, where students remotely interact with devices, instead of in traditional laboratory environment. This kind of remote labs are increasingly popular, but their development has been often focused on specific experiences, to address the needs of a particular lab. Moreover they are often designed for one user at a time, i.e. the user experience can not be shared with others. In the article we discuss a new Web Lab platform that can be easily adapted to a large number of different laboratory equipments and that is based on CSCL (computer-supported collaborative learning) techniques in order to share the lab experience within small groups of remote students.