EXPANDING THE CONCEPT OF REMOTE ACCESS LABORATORIES

The ability of students to participate in laboratory experiences remotely through appropriate technologies has obvious utility for students who are distant from university campuses for whatever reason. This need is experienced in many faculties and this study reports on a project exploring how Remote Access Laboratory (RAL) technologies developed to enhance engineering education can be used to support learning in non technical faculties such as business, arts and education. To take this step, it is necessary to expand the traditional definitions of RAL leading to a range of interpretations of the concept of remote access laboratories; from the traditional, physical and tangible experiment, as is frequently seen in the engineering applications of RAL, to more conceptual experimentation in any form which is conducted remotely. The study focuses on five projects in the Department of Nursing and Midwifery, the Discipline of Surveying and Spatial Science, and the Faculty of Education. Using a program logic framework approach, the project aims to elucidate the pedagogic logic in a range of learning situations and evaluate the usefulness of RAL in each of them. This paper argues that by expanding the concept of remote access laboratories, applications in non technical disciplines are possible and finds that the use of RAL is limited only by the imagination of the teacher and the nature of the learning objectives. It also suggests that the concepts that are currently being applied in engineering RAL applications should be re-evaluated focussing on constructive alignment. On the basis of learning affordances they provide, that these technologies deserve to be, and can be, developed for wider application across all disciplines in order to address the needs of target demographics but also because they offer exciting new ways of providing quality learning to all students.