A SEMI-VIRTUAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT FOR REMOTE ACCESS

Remote access to complex laboratory equipment and the possibility of remotely driving experiments and measurements represent appealing issues of great interest and relevance for research, educational, and industrial purposes. The range of topics potentially involved is very large, including, among others, applications in all fields of engineering, as well as of medicine, biology, and physics [1] Nowadays, the modern learning technologies like e-learning and life-long learning are getting more and more popular. Many current distance learning technologies are passive in that the communication typically flows in one direction, which is only [mm the instructor to the student, and there is no feedback or delayed feedback in reverse direction [2] Virtual labs are the element that changes this architecture and allows feedback from the students and increases the interactivity process. In this aspect the role of the virtual labs is growing rapidly. Many universities have their online laboratories. Such are the virtual lab on the course "Computer Organization", in the University of Rousse Of the virtual laboratory in John Hopkins University[4] and many others. When we talk about e-learning or any other kind of distance education, reasonably arises the question about the laboratory equipment utilization and its remote access. Engineering education without the "touch" to the laboratory equipment is impossible. In one hand, in almost every university lab there is a plenty of hardware equipment that is being used only when traditional classes are being conducted. What we need here is to find a solution to remove the boundaries of the real classroom and to provide remote access and feedback to this equipment. It must be reachable for the students, which are interested on making experiments or playing scenarios whenever they would like and no matter where they are located. The paper is focused on some details of building a remote access system for e-Learning purposes. The system grants remote access for the students to hardware development boards. It combines some features of the virtual e-Learning systems with the benefits of the classical teaching technologies. This is a key factor for the virtualisation process of engineers' training.