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North American Network of Science Labs Online

Environmental Scan Report

FINAL

 

18 - January - 2012

 

Purpose

 

The Environmental Scan identifies other educational remote science labs in the US and Canada with an aim to:

 

• identify initiatives doing similar work but in different science domains. One option for NANSLO network expansion is to bring on partners doing similar work outside of biology, chemistry and physics. Some initiatives may have additional capacity we could tap in to.
• survey what hardware and software others are using for remote science education labs and compare it to what NANSLO is using. This allows us to assess the pros and cons of different solutions and potentially helps us pick applications we still need to choose such as scheduling software.
• identify possible partners who may be interested in joining our network
• identify possible partners who may be interested in joining forces with us to apply for follow-on funding (eg. Next Generation Learning Challenges, National Science Foundation, …)

 

To this end the descriptive information we attempted to include in the record for each remote lab science education project is found: 

Environmental Scan Record Content:

 

Click here for a Sample Completed Record:

 

Overview of Data:

The projects that are "RWSL-like" and within the US and Canada are in Appendix 1.  There were a number of projects outside of the US and Canada that use an approach for delivering remote labs similar to the NANSLO vision.  These are in Appendix 2.  During the scan process, we came across some papers and publications that are of interest.  However this was not the primary focus for the Environmental scan so the URLs for these are preserved in Appendix 3.  Finally our searching turned up many projects dedicated to using simulations and other non-RWSL-like approaches.  These projects were removed form the scan, but their preliminary records are preserved in Appendix 4.  The records in Appendices 3 and 4 are in rough draft form and no further effort will be made to clean these up at this time.  Should a future iteration of this scan occur these records could be completed at that time.

 

It was difficult to find the policies and procedures that would let students and institutions access remote labs simply by reviewing the various project websites.  Often other fields could not be filled in by simply studying the websites as well.  In the end we had to fill this missing information in during the phone interviews that we did with almost all the US and Canadian projects in our scan.  Hence, the Appendix 1 scan records are far more complete than the records in the other Appendices.

 

The Environmental Scan has shown that projects like NANSLO that use an "RWSL-like" approach to serve lab exercises remotely are not prevalent.  As noted above many projects use simulation and other non-RWSL-like approaches.  Even those projects that do serve labs remotely are not serving web-based students, but use their capacity to enhance the education of on campus students giving them remote access to high end equipment, or at least higher end equipment than would normally be found in the vast majority of first year science labs. For example, CASPIE uses research grade gas and liquid chromatography equipment, MIT iLabs are primarily serving Electrical Engineering students, and Science Studio is running a synchrotron and not serving students at all to mention a few.

 

The NANSLO - RWSL approach is to make normal first year science lab equipment available to first year students who are often not on campus. Since class sets do not need to be purchased, an RWSL mediated lab could use higher quality lab equipment than normal, but it would still be recognizable as first year lab equipment.  In fact no other project has taken this approach except for the iLab Network served from Northwestern University in Illinois.  The iLab Network targets the K to 12 system focusing on the higher grade level students.  Many remote lab projects we found target engineering students because engineering labs and in particular electrical engineering labs lend themselves to remote delivery with a minimum of effort and can be batched.

 

Finally, the nature of an Environmental Scan is that it can carry on and on ever discovering new potential projects that need investigating without end.  No projects place their data in a convenient format and order to match our scan records, so hours must be spent with each potential site to try and find the information we are seeking usually without total success.  In the end the only real way to get at ALL the information we are looking for is to interview the contact people for each project of interest.  This is also a time consuming process.  There were a number of projects that have come to light late in the scanning process, 3 of which seem to fit the "RWSL-like" criteria within the US and Canada.  These projects deserve to have interviews done, but there is simply not time if we are to wrap up the Environmental Scan in a timely manner.  So these 3 projects have been included in Appendix 1 with the recommendation that if time permits later, they should also be contacted for an interview. 

 

This all clearly indicates that our Environmental Scan has probably not turned up ALL projects within the US and Canada that are using an "RWSL-like" method to serve science labs to remote students, but it has at least identified a representative group.  As this scan is being published electronically, it will be a simple matter to add projects as they come to light and we have time to consider them.  To this end, anyone reading this report should feel free to transmit the URL and contact information of any project we have missed to the NANSLO team for future inclusion when we have had time to review them.  Appendix 5, Projects Waiting to be Assessed is being created to hold this future information.

 

Direct Contact with Projects

In an effort to collect more complete and dependable information and begin exploring areas of potential collaboration we attempted to interview the contact people for all the projects we had in Appendix 1 at that time as these fit the RWSL-like and US/Canada criteria.  (Appendix 1 has grown since we did those interviews so not all projects there have been contacted at this time.)  We reasoned that these projects might be close enough to NANSLO to form collaborative relationships of various kinds that could be mutually beneficial.

 

Here is the text of the e-mail that we used.  (Click Here)

 

Telephone interviews of approximately one hour duration were done with leads and team members from the following projects:

• MIT iLab Shared Architecture
• iLab Network, Northwestern
• Center for Authentic Science Practice in Education (CASPIE)
• Science Studio

 

Based on notes taken during the phone interview the record for each of these initiatives was updated and expanded. The new version of the record was then sent to the interviewees for review and confirmation of completeness and accuracy.  Feedback from this second review has been incorporated into the final record.

 

The following projects were contacted, but didn't agree to an interview:

• The Integrated Laboratory Network (ILN)
• Extended Classroom for Enhanced Learning

 

To be fair, we did receive a response from ILN and a promise from them to update the environmental scan record for ILN, but to date we have not received that information.  As a result the record for this project does not include anything they might want us to report.  The Extended Classroom for Enhanced Learning did not respond to our request for an interview.

 

NOTE - Recently we became aware of several more projects, three of which should probably be included in Appendix 1.  Hence, these have been added, but no interviews have been possible as yet so their records are incomplete and have not been reviewed by the project principles.  These projects are:

• BCIT Power Engineering:  This program serves remote labs to support BCIT Power Engineering distance students.
• Bismark State College (BSC):  BSC was originally thought to offer only simulations and was initially ignored for this scan, but recent re-examination of their material has revealed that they have developed RWSL-like capabilities through WebLab so they have been added here.
• Next Generation Unified Framework for Remote Laboratory Experiments: It is unclear if this project is strictly a research project or if it plans to serve engineering labs remotely, however upon reviewing one of their presentations it became clear that their vision is very "RWSL-like".

 

For completeness a record for the Web-based Associate of Science project that did the original work on RWSL is also included here.

 

Possible Partners/Collaborators:

During the phone interviews, in addition to completing and correcting our Environmental Scan records from Appendix 1, we explored possible opportunities for collaboration.  Our responses to this were all positive, but it is going to require further discussion to define these opportunities clearly with each project. Here are some notes about the collaboration potential for each project:

 

MIT iLab Shared Architecture:  MIT iLab Shared Architecture is not a remote lab service provider* as the others are and as such will not likely become a collaborator with NANSLO at the service level, but they are creating the tools whereby labs can be offered on-line and they are using LabView, so there are definite areas of overlap with the NANSLO project that could lead to beneficial collaborations on the technical and architectural levels.  One strong recommendation that has come out of this contact is that NANSLO technical staff should download and assess the iLab Shared Architecture software for potential incorporation into RWSL technology or visa-versa.  This is open source free software that will interact with LabView and it does contain some scheduling functions, though probably not at the level required by the NANSLO RWSL Distributed Network.  Whether it is something we can use or not will have to wait for our assessment.  This assessment should be part of any future NANSLO project.

 

*Having said that, the MIT iLab Shared Architecture is not a remote lab service provider per-se, it should be noted that MIT itself does use the shared architecture to serve some engineering labs.   The Electrical Engineering labs in particular lend themselves to remote delivery.

 

iLab Network: There is a very high potential for collaboration with the iLab Network offered by Northwestern University.  Their target audience is K - 12, where NANSLO's is first year, but the remote labs they offer could be included within a NANSLO RWSL distributed network and NANSLO's various labs could be used by high school students contacting the iLab Network.  One interesting note is that the current iLab Network labs are served out of the University of Queensland in Australia.

 

CASPIE: CASPIE is serving research grade laboratory equipment that potentially could be utilized, within a NANSLO distributed Network, but they would probably have little use for our labs.  This doesn't preclude collaborative efforts between our 2 projects, but it would be more challenging.  The CASPIE project also differs with us philosophically in that they do not support entirely web-based students, only those who are on campus.

 

Science Studio: Science Studio is serving only very high end remote equipment (cyclotron and nanofabrication facility) to researchers.  While there are educational aspects to their work, it is primarily aimed at high level research.  We found Dr. Michael Bauer to be very amenable, but given NANSLO's current focus on first year science labs, it is unlikely that we will find enough commonality here for any major co-operative effort.  Having said that, we should still keep this project in the back of our minds in case something does change in the future.

 

ILN: There seems to be some potential for cooperation here. Our initial contact with Devon Cancilla was very positive and Erin Macri will be contacting us with an updated record for this project.  There are potential areas for collaboration, but until we can speak further with them, specific areas cannot be identified.

 

Extended Classroom for Enhanced Learning: The Extended Classroom for Enhanced Learning serves only a scanning electron microscope.  Initially they were seen as a potentially strong collaborator, but unfortunately we received no response from this project when we asked for a phone interview.  Without the phone interview to explore this it is difficult to say, but if some relationship could be forged here it could make this instrument available to NANSLO partners.

 

BCIT Power Engineering, Bismark State College (BSC), and Next Generation Unified Framework for Remote Laboratory Experiments (UFRL):  As mentioned above, we only recently became aware of these projects and have not yet had an opportunity to interview them.  At first glance the BCIT Power Engineering project appears to be focused entirely on providing remote labs that support BCIT's Power Engineering diploma for distance students.  However, the fact that they are located in Burnaby (very close to Vancouver, BC) and that they use LabView means that there could be room for some kind of collaborative effort at least with the BC arm of the NANSLO team if not the entire NANSLO project. The Bismark State College (BSC) project also appears to be primarily focused on providing remote labs that support BSC's Power generation and transmission programs for BSC's distance students.  There could be a possibility for some kind of collaborative effort with BSC, but it remains for some contact to be made to clarify this  It is interesting that both of these projects have a trades focus.  It has not been determined if the UFRL project is strictly a research project or not.  The interesting part of this one is that they have defined (and possibly built) a scheduling tool.  Even if they are not potential distributed network partners because their focus is engineering, they do have information that might help NANSLO address its scheduling needs.

 

Projects Outside the US and Canada:

Some of the best analogs to the NANSLO-RWSL distributed network are outside the US and Canada.  As mentioned above these records are in Appendix 2.  In particular there is the Labshare project at the University of Queensland in Australia and the Remotely Controlled Laboratories (RCL) at the University of Technology Kaiserslautern in Germany.  Labshare uses the MIT iLab Shared Service Architecture to share its labs and is the most successful example of the use of this architecture.  RCL shares labs that are not hugely expensive like a diffraction and interference experiment, wind tunnel, oscilloscope, and a robot maze to mention only a few.  In a later round of this environmental scan, it would be good to look more closely at these projects to assess the possibilities for world-wide collaboration.

 

Scheduling Solutions:

During the environmental scan we hoped to identify potential scheduling solutions for RWSL mediated lab exercises.  No clear solution has been found to date as most remote lab service providers are providing batch labs so they use a queue that is basically first-come first-served.  Since batch labs are not served in real time, students enter a queue, set their experiment up, let their lab be run automatically when their turn comes, and then they collect their results later.  With batch-mode labs, the student does not ever interact directly with the lab equipment.  Another type of lab that also does not require scheduling are the ones where the equipment is continually broadcasting data.  The student can connect to a web page and capture enough data for their lab report.  Since multiple students can connect to the data stream simultaneously scheduling is never an issue.  Scheduling only becomes an issue when the remote labs are served interactively in real time as we are doing with RWSL.  Then there is a very limited number of students (usually 1) who can control the remote lab equipment at any given time.  This is enforced by the fact that the student needs to actually interact with the lab equipment during the lab and make real-time decisions. 

 

The iLab Shared Architecture is designed for all 3 types of lab exercises, but only batch labs have been served extensively so far.  Hence, scheduling has not been a crucial issue for them to date.  During the interview we were told that there is some scheduling for interactive real-time labs built in, but it has not been used extensively so we will want to download a copy of the iLab Shared Architecture to assess its applicability to the RWSL Distributed Network.  Others such as CASPIE, who incidentally do all their scheduling manually, have suggested there might be solutions found in the "high performance computing area" or in Windows HPC.  However they also stated that none of these are a complete solution.  Science Studio simply lets the equipment facilities schedule experiments and Science Studio only supplies the access at the appointed time.  The ILN project uses SciTech Scheduler, which is a product or department peculiar to Western Washington University (WWU).  It is used to not only schedule ILN experiments but also all other technical services on the WWU campus.  The UFRL project reports a scheduling scheme in one of their presentations (see the presentation 1 link in the UFRL record.) that is similar to what we have discussed.  Whether this is an actual in-use scheduler or just a proposed scheduling solution at this time is not clear.  Until it becomes clear if the SciTech Scheduler at WWU is a service that can be used off their campus or not, or the UFRL Scheduler is more than theory, the iLab Shared Architecture is the only possible scheduling solution that has been turned up so far, but it is relatively untested.

 

Conclusions:

In conclusion we have identified US and Canadian initiatives doing similar work, though often in different science domains.  A couple, such as the iLab Network out of Northwestern for certain and possibly the ILN and the Extended Classroom for Enhanced Learning could become collaborative partners in the NANSLO RWSL Distributed Network (RDN).  The above 3 as well as CASPIE may have additional capacity we could tap into.  We did find significant differences in the Hardware and to a lesser extent the software that other initiatives are using.  The iLab Shared Architecture may indeed show us other ways of serving labs.  No project had an obvious scheduling software solution that would serve the NANSLO RDN entirely, but there could possibly be some aspects of other initiatives solutions that could be incorporated in the eventual NANSLO solution.  Finally there was significant interest by everyone interviewed to explore further to identify collaborative funding opportunities.  In fact there is already a serious query from Kemi Jona of the iLab Network who wants to include some RWSL mediated labs in a proposal he is writing.

 

Scheduling remains an unsolved issue.  While there are a couple possibilities that have been identified, as the people from CASPIE suggested, it is the holy grail of serving remote labs on-line.

 

An Environmental Scan is something that could be on-going with no clear end-point, but for the moment we need to 'draw a line' and produce this report.  It is expected that as more information comes to light we will be updating current records and even adding to them, but for reporting purposes we are now calling this one completed.

 

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Appendices

Appendix 1:

Environmental Scan - Projects Within the US and Canada

 

Appendix 2:

Environmental Scan - Projects Outside the US and Canada

 

Appendix 3:

Environmental Scan - Papers and Publications

 

Appendix 4:

Environmental Scan - Projects not using RWSL-like Model

 

Appendix 5:

Environmental Scan - Projects Waiting to be Assessed