Synchronous Collaboration with Virtual and Remote Labs in Moodle

This work presents the tools and procedure developed by the authors to create synchronous collaborative virtual and remote laboratories within a web course produced with a learning management system. Thanks to them, an instructor can prepare virtual and/or remote laboratories and easily add them to its online web course, automatically obtaining collaborative features. Also, any member (either a student or a teacher), as long as s/he is enrolled in the course, can use the system to invite other enrolled users to a real-time collaborative experimental session with any of the laboratories that belong to that course. The extension tools presented in this work are based in two different free and open source software programs: Moodle as the learning management system that offers the web environment and Easy Java Simulations for creating the virtual and remote laboratories with collaborative support.