Ecosystem for the deployment and management of virtual laboratories based on the standard IMS LTI

Abstract

The advancement of information and communication technologies occurs due to the evolutionary capacity of computer equipment as well as the existence of increasingly sophisticated tools and applications. Virtual laboratories, a flexible tool which allows to design, simulate, model and test through experimentation real-life processes, are an example. Virtual laboratories have a great impact on engineering as they improve accessibility to experiments, facilitating the development of strategies in the field of education; they include interactive ways to observe, illustrate, demonstrate and investigate, aside from support system users in the elaboration and exchange of results. For this reason, the experience reflected in this article highlights the design and implementation of an ecosystem for the deployment and management of virtual laboratories, based on the IMS Learning Tools Interoperability standard. In this process, the methods and technologies applicable to the development of virtual laboratories are characterized with an instructional model for experimental environments that identifies the scope of the procedure and the technical criteria, taking into account LabManager, WebLabDeusto and LMS Sakai, and finally the installation and configuration of the cloud platform and the laboratory prototype that responds to the proposed ecosystem.