WebLabs in Education.

Abstract

Remote labs are an emergent educational resource in engineering, which addresses the remote delivery of practical contents, i.e. remote experiments, through the Web. This resource may either be used as a support for e-learning courses in engineering or science, in the cases where on-campus lab work is not possible, or as a complement to face-to-face lab classes, allowing the students to repeat a given experiment on a remote fashion, without time restrictions. The papers in this special focus section of the i-joe journal highlight this very important part of e-learning from several points of view. They represent the results of activities during the first International Conference on Interactive Computer aided Blended Learning (ICBL2007) in Florianopolis, Brazil. The scope of the conference was to bring together the experience in e-learning in higher education in Latin America, Europe and Northern America. The educational institutions in these regions work under different conditions and can share their experience in e-learning in a broad sense.