Abstract
Experimenting is fundamental to the training process of all scientists and engineers. While experiments have been traditionally done inside laboratories, the emergence of Information and Communication Technologies added two alternatives accessible anytime, anywhere. These two alternatives are known as virtual and remote laboratories and are sometimes indistinguishably referred as online laboratories. Similarly to other instructional technologies, virtual and remote laboratories require some effort from teachers in integrating them into curricula, taking into consideration several factors that affect their adoption (i.e., cost) and their educational effectiveness (i.e., benefit). This chapter analyzes these two dimensions and sustains the case where only through international cooperation it is possible to serve the large number of teachers and students involved in engineering education. It presents an example in the area of electrical and electronics engineering, based on a remote laboratory named Virtual Instruments System in Reality, and it then describes how a number of European and Latin American institutions have been cooperating under the scope of an Erasmus+ project, for spreading its use in Brazil and Argentina.
“This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein”.
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Notes
- 1.
The PhET Interactive Simulations Web site, located at https://phet.colorado.edu, reports 360 million accesses in 06.06.2016.
- 2.
According to the Global Online Laboratory Consortium (GOLC), which granted this award, on its 1st edition (2015), to VISIR.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the support given by the European Commission through grant 561735-EPP-1-2015-1-PT-EPPKA2-CBHE-JP and also by the Spanish Office for Education Internationalization (Servicio Español para la Internacionalización de la Educación, SEPIE), through grant 2016-1-ES01-KA203-025327, both under the scope of the Erasmus+ program.
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Alves, G.R. et al. (2018). International Cooperation for Remote Laboratory Use. In: Nascimento, M., Alves, G., Morais, E. (eds) Contributions to Higher Engineering Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8917-6_1
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