Lab Networks in Engineering Education: A Proposed Structure for Organizing Information

Experimentation plays an essential role in engineering education,
allowing to balance theoretical proofs and emphasis on physical intuition. Laboratories
can fulfil several goals at once, but they also involve high costs, mostly
due to equipment, space, and human resources for operating and maintaining
them. Remote-access labs have been proposed as a feasible alternative: developed
since the early 2000s by an ever-increasing research community, they are
real or virtual labs accessible at distance through a computer network. Recently,
alternative bibliometric taxonomies and classifications of current networked remote-
access labs have been proposed. Yet, none of these works proposes a comprehensive
structure to collect and organize the information, especially from a
technical perspective, aiming at the definition of the state of the art and future
outlooks of provided solutions. In the present work, we fill this gap extending
previous works by enlarging their set of criteria towards a general multi-layer
model for networked remote-access labs. We performed a systematic review of
relevant literature to retrieve useful information and to design the data collection
and classification structure, which is finally validated performing a mini-Delphi
method.