Students of both institutions access these laboratories transparently. This remote laboratory has multiple copies (17 devices at the time of this writing) deployed both in UPNA (Spain) and UNIFESP (Brazil), and using LabsLand (Spain) for technology and management of the laboratory. In this article, a cross-national remote laboratory is presented. A remote laboratory is a hardware and software system that allows students to access a real FPGA located somewhere else on the Internet. To solve this problem, remote laboratories can help allow more flexibility to students.
Also, relying on FPGA boards in the classroom is typically problematic because students cannot use the boards for doing projects after classes or during weekends. However, the use of FPGAs in the classroom has several different problems, such as availability or associated costs of acquiring and maintaining the FPGAs.
The results show that the QoS did indeed meet very high standards, and that such an approach can indeed lead to trusted remote laboratories, appropriate for real-world educational usage, and their eventual widespread adoption.įPGAs are a powerful technology for teaching hardware design, through which students can learn how to design hardware using common hardware description languages such as VHDL or Verilog. The study encompasses a period of 736 days and over 72,377 laboratory sessions, and relies on real data, from multiple institutions, of professors and students using the LabsLand Intel DE1-SoC FPGA remote laboratory, of which many instances are deployed. This work evaluates whether by applying an architecture oriented towards cost-effective instance replication and a model oriented towards fault-detection, it is possible to create laboratories that can provide a high QoS and that can therefore be used in a real environment, across multiple institutions. Likewise, such a QoS requires reliability: the laboratory must work, be available and provide correct results. Such a QoS requires a relatively high number of students being able to access the labs concurrently, since classes may include dozens of students. One of the main reasons is that many remote laboratories have traditionally been research-oriented and have not been able to guarantee a high-enough quality of service (QoS) in a real-world educational environment.
Nonetheless, despite their potential, they are not yet a widespread tool across learning institutions. Throughout the years their technology has evolved and they offer great capabilities, that are sometimes even superior to hands on labs. Educational remote laboratories, when properly designed, have been demonstrated to be highly effective from a pedagogical point of view.
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