iLabs: Online access to remote laboratories - Case study Video Lecture | Teach Online: A Comprehensive Approach for Teaching Online - Professional Skills

iLabs is an online system that enables
real laboratory equipment to be operated
remotely through the internet in this
case study dr. Mark Schultz from the
University of Queensland demonstrates
iLabs he talks about how his institution
has developed experiments using this
system that have become a rich online
resource for science students and
teachers from around the world what
we're providing is remote access to
computerized experimental gear I labs
were developed by MIT probably about 12
years ago i suzdal Alamo and Steve lumen
got a grant to put some experiments
online and the insight they had was not
that putting the experiment online was
the great thing but how did you control
access to it how did you scale this up I
didn't want it just for a class of five
or twenty or a hundred students but what
happens if I wanted it for a class of
ten thousand students who were
geographically distributed all over the
planet and we'd had problems with
students doing prax way before the
material or way after because we only
had mean of the pieces of equipment and
we were looking for a better way so the
last job I'd done was built two labs
with 50 bench positions in at a cost of
400 thousand dollars and we knew we were
never going to get this money ever again
so we needed a way a better sharing the
equipment we had and we saw remote labs
as a way around that that if we could
give students access out of hours over
weekends they could run it from their
homes at times of their convenience it's
not applications you download into your
computer the objective is run it in the
browser so it should run anywhere
anytime
we go I love central double the
experiment they're running is basically
to do the inverse square law so that if
you double the distance from the source
you'll get a quarter of the radiation
what they've done is set up some
activities before the students here
before the students go in and then they
can launch the experiment in all of
these we've seen this is the same
experiment they've just set up the
scenario differently and the activity
afterwards will be different but the
running of the experiment looks the same
each time so when you invoke it you say
launch the lab tells you that the
experiments located in Australia so
there's a you can click to look at the
webcam so we can and you can see that's
the lab there this is the pedagogy
they're following where they pick a
question they design an experiment and
they goes through an investigator
interpret that they have to fill in a
book and then finally they get to this
point and here's our radiation source
down the bottom he said by the Muller to
his atomic particles going up when
ionizing and being registered and you
can choose the source we've only got one
plug there at the moment it's strontium
90 but the main thing they can do is
move the source closer to it and you can
see the particles get captured he'll get
measured if they moves right out to the
full distance you get less in here the
journal here takes them through the
steps then that are required so they
have to understand these things and
there's questions about it and then they
work their way through the activities
are better medicine distances near
between 15 and 90 millimeters and Monty
how long do we want to do it for
probably three seconds each and we'd
like to do it three times so it's now
running the experiment they can hit the
webcam and have a look at it and the
wheels spinning down the bottom you can
eyes are quick it'll do the readings and
then you'll see the
this year here rise up some distance and
it'll take another set of readings it's
moving up now does that Mason with a
which is inside whatever it is few
seconds and then move that for the top
level and do it again so now we can get
our results so the distances we took
three readings that isn't the answer
that's the raw data they've got so now
they should go along and analyze that
so they've plotted the the three numbers
there and now you can insert the graph
back in your red book and then we're
supposed to interpret it so that's what
somebody else has done with the piece of
equipment we developed as we go back to
browse I labs so you can see the
radiation went crops up a lot there's a
large number of experiments out there
that people have done all of these run
under the iLab architecture elvis is a
platform available from National
Instruments forcing a dipole is out of
physics at MIT spectrometer experiment
from chemistry inverted pendulum was the
first experiment we did shaker table is
from civil engineering the Neutron beam
runs inside the reactor at MIT I mean
this is a prime example of why we like
our lab experiments this experiment
can't be done by anybody except the few
people that might be allowed into that
room and they don't allow undergrads
into that room it's a high-risk
experiment it's it's a fantastic
experiment to do but not everybody can
do it not many universities have their
own reactor and not many people are
allowed into that sort of space so the
radiation experience we've just been
looking at these unique in high schools
can't do it because you have to have a
radiation officer to lock the sources
away and bring them out all the time and
you've got to be a certified radiation
officer says primary schools and high
schools couldn't do it so this
experiment would allow them to do a
radiation experiment it doesn't detract
from the lab experience you still need
to go into a lab and do things you need
to spill chemicals you need to
and not buyers you need to blow up the
capacitors in your training and get that
tactile haptic experience of how do you
tweak knobs and what happens that's
still part of your training
this isn't which is that or provides
opportunities you couldn't normally do
remote experiments have been around for
probably over 20 years
but they haven't been large-scale so
we're trying to move them more
mainstream we were focused on first year
physics at UQ they've taken it into a
whole new market so that radiation
experiment at the moment is used by I
think fourteen hundred and sixty high
school students across six states in the
u.s. there were students who came back
to it after they submitted their their
solution and kept working so we really
had got amazing engagement the next
level of development is can we
collaborate over an experiment at MIT
whether people are in China India
Australia and and Germany
you