Facilitating the Creation of Virtual and Remote Laboratories for Science and Engineering Education*

For roughly the past ten years, we have been working on creating and using virtual and remote laboratories for Science and Engineering education, and on providing a number of software tools that facilitate their creation. Virtual laboratories, or simulations, can be used to promote a more active role of students when studying certain phenomena. Remote laboratories add the extra value of using real hardware, typically at a distant location, which shows students the additional issues that appear when using real equipment. These pedagogical benefits are particularly effective if the laboratories are designed to be used using an Interactive Engagement approach. Our work, which received the gift of the collaboration with many other people interested in improving education, in particular in Physics and Control Engineering, has taught us what are the features and software platforms required to create virtual and remote laboratories. We review the lessons learned from the past ten years of successful outcomes and how we apply these lessons to prepare for the integration of computers, tablets, and other mobile devices with platform-independent cloud-based computing and laboratories.