Laboratory work by remote experimentation in distance education

Abstract

Distance education is one of the major directions of education at universities with technological and science orientation. For these universities, laboratory work is a major challenge and is a bottleneck for departments in charge of the distance education. The main reason rests in the necessity to assemble the students according to a certain time schedule in the hands-on laboratory and to work in a predetermined time more or less synchronously with the instructor who is present in the laboratory. We want to present our results on overcoming this obstacle by introducing the remote experiments from e-laboratories. In this paper, we present the e-laboratory composed of remote real interactive experiments, running round the clock, covering the fields of dc, ac currents and electromagnetic induction for a basic course of Electricity and Magnetism. These experiments were setup on the University of Trnava, Faculty of Education, Department of Physics, based on the Internet School Experimental System (ISES) hardware, software and client-server web services. E-laboratory is freely accessible on the website http://kf.truni.sk/remotelab. Our experience is presented dealing with how the distance students use remote experiments in a completely asynchronous way and how the subject matter of the course is delivered, using the methodology known as Integrated e-Learning (INTe-L). The educational research using the normalized gain <G> approach of Hake indicated a positive effect on the group from using remote experimentation.