Virtual and Remote Laboratory Development: A Review

The Internet technology has provided additional teaching strategies, with online education being one of the most exciting enhancements. A particular challenge for online education in engineering is how to extend the traditional hands-on laboratories to the Internet. Currently, there are two approaches to conducting labs online, virtual and remote labs. Virtual lab is based on software to simulate the lab environment while remote lab, by definition, is an experiment which is conducted and controlled remotely through the Internet. These experiments use real components or instrumentation at a different location from where they are being controlled or conducted. There are many emerging technologies which have been used to develop the virtual and remote laboratory. However, there are few papers that review the virtual and remote laboratory development. In this paper, a review of the different online delivery methods for virtual and remote laboratory development is presented. The open research issues and conclusion with possible future directions on the virtual and remote engineering laboratory development is also presented.