Experience of experimental teaching and management based on cloud computing

Many laboratories were set up in Chinese higher education institutions in recent years. Some of them in the same university are equipped with similar rigs, which may lead to waste of money and human power in their setup and maintenance, and inconvenience and inefficiency for both faculties and students. An experimental teaching and management system, Open Laboratory Access (OLA), based on cloud computing technology is presented to enable full sharing and deep integration of experimental resources among laboratories and provide improved user experience. OLA provides a comprehensive and multi-angle virtual experimental teaching and management functions, including online experiment schedule and laboratory rig reservation, intelligent experiment guidance, teaching effectiveness evaluation, automatical experiment results statistics, etc. Thin-clients are adopted to reduce cost and ensure consistent user experience. After a one-year trial, the results of a user experience survey indicate that OLA provides good experience of experiment for both faculties and students.