The educational phenomena studied in this paper is remote-controlled physical laboratory environments and their applicability in upper secondary school physics education. In order to gain a better understanding of the situation and needs regarding laboratory activities in the upper secondary school, eight physics teachers were interviewed at six different schools. This revealed that the resources for laboratory activities vary between schools and may be inconsistent with the Swedish National Agency for Education curriculum. Furthermore, 165 upper secondary school students answered a questionnaire survey regarding subject preferences, program choices, views on technology and self-ability, and approach to technology and technology-related situations. The acquired knowledge provides a basis concerning the needs and conditions of teaching and learning within the subject of physics. This new knowledge motivates the development of the Flipped laboratory concept that is introduced in this paper, based on remote-controlled physical laboratories, for upper secondary school. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

This work provides a bibliometric perspective of the academic production about VISIR in Latin America. For this purpose, papers, articles and chapters provided by the VISIR research teams' representatives in the region are compiled. They are then analyzed according to the following variables: type of production (published and unpublished paper, article, chapter and book); year of publication/presentation; language; institutions of affiliation of the authors; interinstitutional composition of the group of authors; international composition of the group of authors; and place of dissemination. In this way, the aim is to map the academic production with respect to areas and institutions and consider its impact from language and means of dissemination. The conclusions can be summarized in two ideas: 1) the great boost provided by the VISIR+ Project for academic production and 2) the capacities installed in the region, which keep productivity despite the finalization of the aforementioned project. © 2021 IEEE.

Access to practical laboratory exercises has always been a challenge in STEM education and is even more of a problem in online or distance learning programmes. In this paper, some training demands in STEM, related to experimentation and the operation of equipment, and the ways in which distance education can contribute to them are systematized. After a brief description of the different forms, some experiences that have been implemented in different parts of the world are compiled. It will also describe efforts that are underway to create an international community to share ideas, equipment and carry out collaborative research into the possibilities and impact of these efforts. © 2020 SEFI 48th Annual Conference Engaging Engineering Education, Proceedings. All rights reserved.

Remote laboratories are the result of a social movement which promotes accessible educational resources anywhere and anytime through the Internet in order to foster lifelong learning and support online/distance education. A remote laboratory is a real laboratory using real equipment, on which measurements are made through real instruments and which is controllable remotely. The VISIR (Virtual Instrument Systems In Reality) remote laboratory is a system on top of the state-of-The-Art for online wiring and measuring electronic circuits. The PILAR (Platform Integration of Laboratories based on the Architecture of visiR) Erasmus Plus project aims for the federation of five of the existing VISIR nodes, for sharing analog electronics experiments and empowering capacity and resources of each partner, as well as providing access to other educational institutions to a VISIR remote lab through the PILAR consortium. This workshop will allow the attendees to interact with VISIR remote lab, and to be introduced in PILAR framework and joining policies as well as remote lab federation benefits both for VISIR system owners and consumers. © 2019 IEEE.

The VISIR+ Project was launched in 2015 with the objective of spreading the use of the VISIR remote laboratory in Latin America, promoting an enquiry-based approach to teaching and learning on electric and electronic circuits. Within the scope of this project, several didactical implementations were achieved both in Argentina and in Brazil. This article describes the latest implementation of VISIR in a pre-university technical school in Argentina (associated partner of the VISIR+ team) in three Physics courses with students having different background knowledge and interests. A set of activities comprising simulations, remote and hands-on experiments were designed in order to engage students in the learning process. The implementation was assessed in terms of the learning objectives and outcomes. Results showed that VISIR is an effective tool to promote active learning. Moreover, this experience seems highly valuable to encourage the dissemination of VISIR in Argentina. © 2018 IEEE.

The PILAR (Platform Integration of Laboratories based on the Architecture of visiR) Erasmus Plus project started in September 2016 and will last three years. The core of the PILAR project is the VISIR remote laboratory-Virtual Instruments System In Reality-. The project aims for a federation of five of the existing VISIR nodes, sharing experiments, capacity and resources among partners, and to provide access to VISIR remote lab, through PILAR consortium, to students from other educational institutions. PILAR will be the framework from which management tasks will be performed and laboratories/experiments will be shared. PILAR will also foster the Special Interest Group of VISIR under the Global Online Laboratory Consortium (GOLC) of the International Association of Online Engineering (IAOE). © 2018 IEEE.

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.

Social demands have promoted an educational approach based on an 'anywhere and anytime' premise. Remote laboratories have emerged as the answer to the demands of technical educational areas for adapting themselves to this scenario. The result has not only benefit distance learning students but has provided new learning scenarios both for teachers and students as well as allowing a flexible approach to experimental topics. However, as any other solution for providing practical scenarios (hands-on labs, virtual labs or simulators), remote labs face several constraints inherited from the subsystems of its deployment - hardware (real instruments, equipment and scenario) and software (analog/digital conversions, communications, workbenches, etc.}. This paper describes the Erasmus+ project Platform Integration of Laboratories based on the Architecture of visiR (PILAR) which deals with several units of the federation installed in different educational institutions and devoted to analog electronics and electrical circuits. Based on the limitations of remote labs, the need for the federation will be justified and its benefits will be described by taking advantage of its strengths. The challenges that have come up during the different stages and the different approaches to design are also going to be described and analyzed. © 2018 IEEE.

Laboratory experiments play a crucial role in engineering education as they strongly contribute to the development of important skills for the professional practice. This paper addresses a students' understanding gap between simulations and remote labs. These two resources (and namely the remote laboratory VISIR - Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality) have been commonly used on several didactical implementations, along with other didactical resources in different Engineering degrees at the Federal University of Santa Catarina and Polytechnic of Porto School of Engineering. This work, developed in the scope of the VISIR+ Project, intends to evaluate students' perceptions considering simulation and remote lab results. Quantitative and qualitative data were analyzed to better understand how deeply students realize the differences between these resources and their type of data. Preliminary results indicate that a considerable number of student's don't have a clear idea of these differences, even though sometimes they know their definition. Furthermore, this gap does not seem to differ much with the context (country, course, academic year, course content), students' final grades, teacher approach or implemented tasks. © 2017 Association for Computing Machinery.

Experimental activities with real components are an essential part of all courses including or devoted to electrical and electronic circuits theory and practice. The knowledge triangle composed of hand-written exercises, simulations and traditional lab experiments has been enriched with the possibility for students to conduct real experiments over the Internet, using remote labs. This tutorial is devoted to one such remote lab named Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality (VISIR). The Global Online Laboratory Consortium (GOLC) elected VISIR as the best remote controlled laboratory in the world, at the first time this distinction was awarded. At the end of this tutorial, attendees are expected to know what is VISIR, what can (not) be done with it, who is currently using it, and how can one integrate it in a given course curriculum.