Standards for the Integration of Online Laboratories With Learning Management Systems

Abstract

Laboratory work is essential in most applied science and engineering specific coursers. The continuous advances in Information and Communication Technologies be able the use of online laboratories (OLs). Their use is increased due to the advantages they offer compared to conventional laboratories, as unfortunately verified during Covid-19 pandemic. OLs and Learning Management Systems (LMSs) are key technologies in the learning process field. Normally, the integration of OLs with LMSs is carried out using proprietary or ad-hoc solutions. Furthermore, there are standards that can be used for this integration, such as: LTI, IEEE P92741.1 (xAPI), SCORM and IEEE1876. This work elaborates a survey which has been provided to the experts of online laboratories for them to complete. Gathered information allowed authors to diagnose the level of knowledge and use of the main standards for creating and integrating OLs. In fact, the analysis of this information confirms that there is a lack of criteria for selecting one standard against the others and how use it in the online laboratory development. This work gives guidelines for selecting the most appropriate standard according to desired characteristics of the online laboratory under development.

Keywords

• Distance learning
• educational technology
• electronic learning
• engineering education
• laboratories
• learning management systems