A framework for interactive courses and virtual laboratories

Theory and experimentation are both complementary in sciences. Where the former builds up a formal framework, the latter helps humans to develop their intuition. Hard-printed books are great supports for theorems and formulas repositories, but stay desperately static when providing examples. This paper presents some directions towards a framework for digital publishing, distance learning and computer-aided teaching. The interactive digital signal processing (DSP) book is built in this framework and provides a concrete example to the reader. The book, reachable at http://lcavwww.epfl.ch/DSPBook, is used as a digital support for a course taught by our lab to a third year undergraduate class in electrical engineering.