Work in progress — A global grid of educational online labs based on the MIT iLab Shared Architecture

Technology-enhanced learning is becoming a new important trend in higher education worldwide. In particular, engineering education is becoming an exciting emerging field of research because it involves a multitude of disciplines which aim to resolve the pedagogical problems that arise with the advancement of technology. This paper discusses the creation of a common grid of online laboratories based on a semantic web portal and service broker platform including experiment applications for the use in different levels of education. The so called Web 3.0 technology is actually growing daily and is proposed to be one of the leading Web technologies within the next years. Improved search and publishing mechanisms are some key features of the self-growing grid. Online laboratories are interactive experiments which are available over the Internet and can be divided into two main groups, software simulations and laboratories made up of real hardware equipment.