Standardization Layers for Remote Laboratories as Services and Open Educational Resources

Delivering education and educational resources has evolved from classcentered settings towards distributed, cloud-based models. This is mainly the consequence of publicly available educational resources such as documents, videos, and web applications. At the same time, emerging technologies in information and communication are enabling the development and deployment of remote laboratories on the Web. Today, these freely and openly available educational interactive media are known as Open Education Resources (OERs). Learning management systems, MOOC platforms, and educational social media platforms provide a medium for teachers to create their teaching activities around OERs in a structured way. To enjoy an effective and productive learning experience, it is necessary for the educational resources to be fully integrated in the hosting platform. While most platforms have a ready-to-embed infrastructure for certain types of OERs, they are not ready to host remote laboratories in an integrated fashion. In this paper, we define the necessary integration layers for remote labs in online learning environments. The work is validated by two implementations with different target platforms.