Google Calendar™ for managing and monitoring the utilization of a web-based laboratory´s resources

The need for scheduling appears wherever the number of users in any system exceeds the number of its resources. This can be applied to any educational or training-delivery institution where the users are the students and the resources are the laboratory equipments, for example. While some institutions decided to buy or design their own scheduling systems, we thought that web-tools have enormous potential for this purpose. To demonstrate our idea, we describe in this contribution the design and prototype implementation of a scheduling system that uses Google Calendar™ for managing access to the resources in the web-based laboratory that we designed for supporting Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) courses and linked with Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment. This system allows learners to reserve a timeslot for themselves whenever they do not find a free resource to use immediately. It also registers access to the laboratory facilities allowing instructors to collect data on the resource utilization and learners behavior.