An Integrated Example of Laboratories as a Service into Learning Management Systems

Abstract

Remote practical experiences are nowadays essential in the context of distance education, because students cannot use face-to-face traditional laboratories. These remote laboratories can be used by faculty within virtual classrooms, so that students can carry out their on-line experiments in a ubiquitous way – from anywhere and at any time. But these activities cannot be isolated from the learning process of students. Therefore, the services  provided by a remote laboratory must be integrated into the institutional Learning Management System (LMS), in order to be employed during the whole learning process. In this work, a fully-functional example of the integration of service-oriented remote laboratories into a LMS is presented, where the Moodle platform has been chosen as a representative LMS