Extending LMS with Collaborative Remote Lab Features

In university education, classroom activities are more and more combined with on-line teaching materials, webinars, electronic forums, wikis, web calendar and so on. This “blended approach” is often based on the adoption of Learning Management Systems (LMS), which are customized in many aspects to match both the teaching style of the university and the needs of teachers and students. More recently, also laboratory experiments, that are integral parts of science and technology classes, have come online. The first generation of Remote Web Laboratories (RWL) has demonstrated the feasibility and the effectiveness of on line experiments, with two major drawbacks: the lack of integration between LMS and RWL and the lack of synchronous interaction among the participants (teacher and students) to the experiment. In this scenario, the paper discusses the principal aspects and the main results about an integration project between the Moodle LMS and the MicroNet RWL at University of Salento, in Italy.