Experience With Remote Laboratories For On-Campus Engineering Degrees

Remote laboratories extend the teaching and learning opportunities available for oncampus courses, by increasing the overall capacity for practical work and enabling new types of activities. We present three case studies from different types of usage within the School of Engineering at the University of Edinburgh over the last three academic years. Each case study provides an overview of the experimental hardware and user interface, the learning context and reflections on their development from our perspective as providers of the system. The case studies include a pendulum lab that provided large cohorts of students access to lab equipment in a traditional classroom setting with in-person peer-to-peer and peer-tostaff interactions, but with remote equipment; a truss lab that was used to provide live lecture demonstrations and real-world data for tutorial questions ; and a spinning disk lab that allowed students to complete assessed coursework during the Covid-19 pandemic. Our remote laboratories have been successfully used under both pandemic and post-pandemic conditions, with ongoing usage growing. The software and hardware is open-source so as to enable adoption by a wider community of users.