Remote labs and social media: Agile aggregation and exploitation in higher engineering education

This paper presents an agile aggregation and exploitation framework to provide access to remote laboratory experiments to higher engineering education students using a social media platform, namely Graaasp. The usage of this advanced social media enables educators or students to build personal learning environments that include invited peers, tutors or educators, aggregated or recommended resources, as well as online experiments and relevant simulation or data analysis services. The services and the experiments are accessible through simple widgets that can easily be implemented and that can intercommunicate with lightweight protocols such as RSS feeds. The proposed approach is illustrated with services supporting a control course taught at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL).