Collaborative learning and teamwork over the web

Distance learning using internet as q communication medium has been successful for instructional education. The paradigm of instructional education deals with a real time interaction between a tutor and students. The next phase of internet powered distance education is to enable laboratory based education. This can be achieved by providing an interactive, collaborative experience and live access to the equipment while an experiment is being conducted. The key objective of this study is to provide remote access capability for engineering laboratories and create cyber-enabled, hands-on laboratory environments. The primary challenges for a cyber-enabled laboratory include technological issues related to communication infrastructure as well as non-technical issues such as determining collaborative interaction among remote students. Based on these challenges, we have evaluated and developed software & hardware components to provide a streamlined, web-centric laboratory experience for remote access students.