Aspects of Traditional versus Virtual Laboratory for Education in Instrumentation and Measurement

Nowadays the multimedia tools have an important role in both the management of the lectures and the organization of the course program on instrumentation and measurement. In this new scenario, the virtual laboratory (VL) represents the environment in which the learning activities are performed. Starting from this observation, in the paper an overview of the state of the art of the VL-based education on instrumentation and measurement is given. The fundamental aspects concerning both the software and the hardware to design the VL are examined. Attention it is also devoted to innovative requirements and interesting open questions arising from the large diffusion of the VLs