A Toolkit to Facilitate the Development and Use of Educational Online Laboratories in Secondary Schools

Online laboratories have gained motion during the last decade, mainly due to the increase of online education programs. Online labs provide pedagogical values in some circumstances and fill in some gaps left open by traditional hands-on experiments. It is however a challenge to develop and deploy such laboratories for lecturing staff, as special software development skills are needed for such a task. In this research, we propose a novel approach for the deployment of new experimentation equipment. This system is not tailored to any specific type of laboratory. It can rather be understood as general purpose service, or lab as a service (LaaS). It is different from the approaches to deliver lab as a service implemented to date because the intended consumers of our service are lab owners, and not lab users (students, teachers and lab instructors). It shifts the complexity of a lab server to a central location (cloud) and ensures that the consumer (lab owner) has only to implement a tiny piece of software to deploy an online laboratory.