iLabs is dedicated to the proposition that online laboratories
- real laboratories accessed through the Internet - can enrich science and
engineering education by greatly expanding the range of experiments that
students are exposed to in the course of their education. Unlike conventional
laboratories, iLabs can be shared across a university or across the world. The
iLabs vision is to share expensive equipment and educational materials
associated with lab experiments as broadly as possible within higher education
and beyond.
iLab teams have created remote laboratories at MIT in microelectronics,
chemical engineering, polymer crystallization, structural engineering, and
signal processing as case studies for understanding the complex requirements of
operating remote lab experiments and scaling their use to large groups of
students at MIT and around the world.
Based on the experiences of the different iLab development teams, The iLabs
Project is developing a suite of software tools that makes it efficient to bring
online complex laboratory experiments, and provides the infrastructure for user management. The iLabs Shared Architecture has the following
design goals:
- Minimize development and management effort for users and providers of remote
labs.
- Provide a common set of services and development tools.
- Scale to large numbers of users worldwide.
- Allow multiple universities with diverse network infrastructures to share remote labs.