A Community of Real Laboratories with Conectivity to Internet 2 for Remote Usage

摘要

Among the operation costs of a college or university, one of the highest is that corresponding to the operation of laboratories; at the same time, the cost for building and preparing a laboratory is several times the cost of a classroom. Also, it is frequent among teachers and students to have a certain degree of unsatisfaction with respect to the availability of laboratories, specially for instructional purposes.rnDuring the last years, a lot of interest has been dedicated to "virtual" laboratories, that is basically the use of computer simulation to allow students to work "as if" they were in a real lab. This has been an important step towards strengthening the relation between theory and practice in certain subjects and will certainly receive a great deal of attention in the near future. Nevertheless, there are certain subjects, specially in engineering curricula, in which it is fundamental to have more contact with real environments, and simulation will not fulfill the learning objectives. In some of these subjects the manipulative actions of the students and the observations they make are mediated through instrumentation and electronic apparata, and in these cases there would be no important degradation of the results if the student can observe the real piece of equipment under study and actuate on it from a place distant to the installation if an adequate communication link is provided, and this would be, precisely, the use of the Internet 2 service.