Hands-On Remote Labs: Collaborative Web Laboratories as a Case Study for IT Engineering Classes

The development of a reusable collaborative software framework for the remote control of a large range of laboratory equipments is an interesting topic to teach information technologies in an engineering school. The design and implementation of this kind of framework, in fact, requires the ability to integrate skills about software engineering, computer networks, human-computer interaction, distributed architectures, and remote control of hardware devices (i.e., laboratory equipments). In the paper, we describe our experience in the development of a reusable framework for remote laboratories, which has been adopted as a case study in two different scenarios at our university.