Simplifying the implementation of educational online laboratories

This work in progress paper describes the implementation of software components that aim at facilitating the development of online laboratories. We propose the creation of an additional level of abstraction in the development process of online laboratories that would allow teaching staff to plug existing equipment into a Remote Laboratory Management System (RLMS) and share it with peers and students. Online laboratories provide pedagogical values in some circumstances and many researchers encourage their use. It is however a challenge to develop and deploy such laboratories for lecturing staff, as special software development skills are needed for such a task. In this research, we propose a novel approach for the deployment of new experimentation equipment. To ease this deployment process we developed a software prototype that can be used across a broad range of domains that provides an easy way to connect laboratory equipment to the World Wide Web. Preliminary results show potential for this prototype to be used on large scale.