Real Time Virtual Laboratory Solution Prototype and Evaluation for Online Engineering Degree Programs

One of the challenges of online engineering education is to provide students with hands-on laboratory experiences that require being in an on-campus laboratory. Virtual laboratory technical solutions have been developed over the last decade to allow learners to simulate engineering systems online or to connect to predesigned system modules within physical laboratories. However, these predesigned solutions must be acquired as software and hardware components that require a certain budget and training time before they can be used. In addition, these solutions do not concentrate on the construction portion of the systems under experimentation, but rather on testing the predesigned module using a virtual application that connects to it. In this paper, we developed a solution that enables online learners to build virtual systems, step-by-step, at their ends and connect them to real-time on-campus labs to perform remote experimentations with logic gates systems. We used a combination of technologies, such as Virtual Networking Computing (VNC) technology, Video Conferencing (VC) technology, and Object Oriented Programming (OOP). Our solution was practically proven using Python programming running on a Raspberry PI system to construct sample examples of virtual logic gates applications. This allows online students to concentrate on constructing, step-by-step, logic gate systems remotely, and to control actual physical logic gate systems within an on-campus lab with the help of a webcam. Our solution was tested by a group of learners and was proven to be a cost-effective alternative to traditional laboratory experiences.