From the Collaborative Environment of the Remote Laboratory NetLab to the Global Collaboration

The remote laboratory (RL) can be considered as a modern collaborative learning environment, where students acquire skills required for efficient collaboration and communication on a local and global scale, both today and in the near future. The majority of current existing RLs are not constructed to allow the involved participants to collaborate in real time. This paper describes the collaborative RL NetLab, developed at the University of South Australia (UniSA), which allows up to three onshore and/or offshore students to conduct remote experiments at the same time as a team. This allows the online RL environment to become very similar, if not nearly identical to its real laboratory counterpart. The collaboration in the real laboratory is replaced by the "global" on-line collaboration.