Web-based environment for collaborative remote experimentation

Remote experimentation helps to overcome restrictions in time and space. In local experimentation students usually work together in groups of two or more. This learning paradigm is often called collaborative learning. This paper presents a Web-based approach to collaborative remote experimentation. The collaborative environment introduced here allows experimentation in a team. The group is able to interact and to discuss the results of their work. A real collaboration like in local experimentation is possible. Students have access to the experiments via Internet from anywhere at any time. They control the experiments exclusively with their standard Web browser, no additional software is needed. The remote laboratory is based on a client/server architecture, which is mainly implemented in the Java programming language. The methods and software modules presented in this paper are generic and frequently used in several remote experiments.