The Electronic Laboratoty Journal: A Web-Based Collaborative Environment for Remote Experimentation

The Electronic Laboratory Journal: A Web-Based Collaborative Environment for Remote Experimentation Georgios Fakas, and Denis Gillet Numerous tools have been developed that support the collaboration between students in education, tools that mainly include facilities for sharing documents and enabling discussions. However, these environments do not emphasize the use of facilities that sustain collaborative work in the framework of remote experimentation carried out by a group of students located at different places. We propose the Electronic Laboratory Journal paradigm, as a collaborative and cooperative environment for remote experimentation in engineering education. The Electronic Laboratory Journal enhances the traditional laboratory journal, by providing a group of students with Web-based tools to maintain notes in order to remotely complete their experimentation assignment by collecting, discussing, exchanging or sharing information and also by documenting and finally submitting their results to their educators. Notes may be composed of numerous objects of any format, such as text, images, graphics, manuscripts, measurement logs or simulation results. The Laboratory Journal also facilitates educators to remotely supervise, assist and tutor the progression of students with their learning activities. The Electronic Laboratory Journal paradigm is currently validated in the framework of the eMersion project, which aims at developing at EPFL (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne) hands-on resources for flexible learning in engineering education focusing on remote manipulation of real setups and web-based simulation facilities. The Laboratory Journal is designed to be an open and reusable Web-based application. For this reason, XML and Java technologies are deployed. This paper presents the Electronic Laboratory Journal environment, its application and validation in the eMersion project, its pedagogical benefits, and its technical peculiarities. Index Terms  Knowledge Engineering, Collaborative Learning, Distance Learning, Web-Based Experimentation.