A Remote and Virtual Lab with Experiments for Secondary Education, Engineering and Lifelong Learning Courses

The Information and Communication Technology tools are nowadays fundamental to support e-learning and blearning courses. The Remote and Virtual Laboratory available at the Department of Informatics Engineering of the University of Coimbra (Portugal), RVL@DEI-UC, is a web-based platform that allows users to perform experiments in different educational levels and contexts. This paper aims to describe its potential use in secondary education, engineering and lifelong learning courses. The conceptualization, architecture and implementation of the web platform for real and virtual experiments, remotely controlled using the Internet, are presented and the relevance of the lab’s integration in an intelligent tutoring system is also discussed, mainly in what concern the requirements of adaptation to users’ profile in different learning contexts. KeywordsRemote and virtual lab; intelligent tutoring system, b-learning; secondary education; engineering education; lifelong learning.