DISCOVIR: A Framework for Designing Interfaces and Structuring Content for Virtual Labs

As education and technology merge, the opportunity for teaching and learning expand even more. However, the juxtaposition of the latest technologies has also raised concern for academic institutions as to which technologies are most effective in terms of cost, reach, richness, and, most importantly, learning. In this paper, we present a novel development framework, which we call as DISCOVIR, for asynchronous virtual lab development. Our aim is to simplify the process of developing the content for a virtual lab and to make the resulting labs more consistent for the learners (students). We incorporate the popular Model View Controller architecture, in building the user interface for the virtual lab. It allows the lab developers to focus completely on the quality of the content while the look and the feel for the resultant lab is provided in the form of customizable themes. We define an HTML5 based semantic structure for writing the lab content. It ensures long term sustainability of the lab and supports semantic search capabilities. Our model makes no prior assumptions or requisites in terms of expertise and tools required to use it in practice. A lab developer is free to use any html editor on any operating system to build his lab. It requires no costly software installations and runs locally without a web server support. Our proposed model is currently being used by 16 of the 28 virtual labs from IIIT, Hyderabad.