Implementation of cloud-based smart adaptive remote laboratories for education

Remote Laboratories are used in educational settings as tools to give students access to experiments that are not physically available to them at their institutions. During implementation, problems such as: bandwidth, security or limitations in terms of the usability, have been identified. This paper proposes an approach that integrates, what we call, a Smart Adaptive Remote Laboratory (SARL) with Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) to improve the students' experience by automatically adapting the experiments according to the student's current level of knowledge and experience. For this purpose, the laboratory experiment is connected with the VLE to access the student profile and academic information. This information is used by the SARL to adapt the educational content and the experimental interfaces accordingly. All students access the same set of equipment, but the adaptive system shows a variation of the graphic user interface with different controls and activities. The VLE provides the assessment component, completing the learning experience. The results of the experiments are stored in the remote laboratory system and sent back to the VLE to update the student information. A Raspberry Pi microcontroller and a web camera are used as hardware of the remote interface. The prototype software platform was implemented using Python and JavaScript languages and HTML 5 interface. The paper presents the design of the remote laboratory, the software integration model, and describes the details about the implementation of the prototype using this SARL strategy.