Work in progress — Integrating educational online lab platforms around the iLab Shared Architecture

This work in progress focuses describing the work being carried out at the Carinthia University of Applied Sciences (CUAS) as a collaborative work around online electronics laboratories together with BHT, Sweden and MIT, USA to integrate two different and well known online lab architectures so that users are not limited to the availability of one or the other. These platforms are VISIR (Virtual Systems in Reality) and the iLab Shared Architecture (ISA). While VISIR delivers, among others, electronics experiments in a highly flexible online workbench where circuits can be built and tested in a similar way as in traditional hands on laboratories, ISA focuses in providing mechanisms for sharing online laboratories in a distributed Web services based architecture by managing lab session scheduling and maintenance while a experiment is executed. Opening VISIR based labs to use the standard online lab support services provided by the ISA brings several advantages to both sides.