A signal processing laboratory employing on-line teaming for remote experiments

The impact of distance learning (DL) is increasing daily. Such an educational delivery mode intends to serve the desire of both students and their instructors for scheduling freedom. Further, engineering education also has a costly component that is not directly time related: the use of sophisticated equipment. A subset of DL efforts is that of web-based laboratory experiments. Most investigators are delivering experiments via the Internet, but targeted to a single on-line user. Presented here is a different approach that stimulates teaming, even when simultaneous remote users are geographically dispersed. Students do not share the same physical location, but rather a virtual one: a multi-user laboratory platform. Within the paper, this philosophical approach and the implementation details (including chat, video, archiving, hardware and software platforms) are explained. One of the main advantages offered by a virtual laboratory is that students from all over the world can use the equipment located in a particular physical laboratory. The particular hardware employed here is organized around a spectrum analyzer.