Javier Garcia-Zubia

University of Deusto | DEUSTO · Industrial Technologies

VISIR is a remote laboratory oriented to analogue electronics. There are several copies of VISIR around the world (Sweden, Spain, Portugal, Costa Rica, Brazil, Argentina, India, Australia, Morocco, …) that are being used by thousands of students. It is well known that VISIR allows teachers and students to create and measure real electrical and elec...

Educational remote laboratories are tools that allow students to access physical equipment from any location, online. There are different systems and tools created over the years to this end both in academia and industry. One of the fields where this technology has been applied most often is the teaching of Digital Electronics and FPGAs, taught in...

Schools in rural areas lack adequate scientific-technological equipment for economic and organizational reasons. This means that these students cannot optimally develop their STEM interests. The R3 project described in this paper addresses this problem from remote experimentation in order to democratize access to science for all people.

The Virtual Instrument Systems In Reality (VISIR) remote laboratory was considered the best remote laboratory in the world, by the Global Online Laboratory Consortium (GOLC), in 2015. The first operational version of the VISIR remote laboratory was deployed in 2001. It was designed by Ingvar Gustavsson, with the collaboration of Kristian Nilsson an...

Remote laboratories allow students to perform and watch scientific experiences even if they can’t be physically in a science laboratory. Although it is a fine solution, it has a few shortcomings, being the lack of immersion being one of the most cited ones. Nonetheless, Virtual Reality (VR) improves the users’ experience while using remote laborato...

The rise of systems based on the Internet of Things paradigm, and its relevance in industrial digitization through cyber-physical systems, lead to new educational needs related to these technologies. At the same time, the continuous evolution of embedded systems requires a constant update of the hands-on laboratories, which results in an unaffordab...

Educational remote laboratories are tools that allow students to access physical equipment from any location, online. There are different systems and tools created over the years to this end both in academia and industry. One of the fields where this technology has been applied most often is the teaching of analog electronics, taught in most Engine...

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are crucial in contemporary society, with 3D printing being a notable application. While widely used, its implementation in schools faces challenges such as long printing times, material wastage, energy consumption, and limited accessibility. Addressing these challenges, remote laboratories offer a v...

Extended Remote Laboratories (XRLs) have emerged as a potential solution to address the lack of science laboratories in educational institutions, a deficit that hinders the attainment of a Quality Education outlined in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. By integrating physical assets with Extended Reality (XR) technologies, XRLs provide a...

Remote labs are especially important for learning because they bring real results and each experience is unique. On the other hand, lack of immersion is one of the negative aspects of remote labs. This aspect can be solved through the integration of Extended Reality (XR) in remote laboratories. Extended Reality is an umbrella term that includes the...

Remote Laboratories (RLs) break barriers in education since they provide real experimentation anytime and anywhere. However, their greatest drawback is the lack of immersion. However, Extended Reality (XR) can overcome this shortcoming through the integration of AR, or VR techniques, into remote experimentation, thus developing Extended Reality Rem...

Adapting intelligent systems to the end-user goals and their desire for involvement is essential when designing trustworthy interactive solutions. In intelligent environments, where sensitive information must be preserved, the challenge becomes two-fold: i) approaching the critical personal data to the user to promote privacy (i.e., Edge Computing)...

Rural schools are not, in general, well equipped for the STEM disciplines, but the students in rural areas should have the same opportunities that the students in the urban areas. The use of remote experiments could mitigate this situation. Remote experimentation democratizes the access to science and technology. This papers describes the R3 Projec...

A hyperspectral image makes it possible to collect and process information in the electromagnetic spectrum. Through the analysis of these images, information on the chemical composition of the sample under study can be obtained. The field of application of this type of technology is very extensive: the food industry, pharmaceuticals, forensic analy...

This article proposes a roadmap for the VISIR remote laboratory based on a SWOT analysis performed by fifteen experts, with large experience on VISIR deployment, and their perceptions in three categories: Technical, Pedagogical and Educational. The resulting VISIR roadmap was obtained considering an underlying strategy based on a RAKID model. The m...

Educational continuity has been made possible by the fact that teacher education and teacher collaboration systems have evolved rapidly to provide teachers with the knowledge and skills they need both to adopt new pedagogies and to support students and their families during the pandemic. Therefore, it is recommended that the ongoing professional de...

Educational remote laboratories, when properly designed, have been demonstrated to be highly effective from a pedagogical point of view. Throughout the years their technology has evolved and they offer great capabilities, that are sometimes even superior to hands on labs. Nonetheless, despite their potential, they are not yet a widespread tool acro...

As the number of interconnected devices increases and more Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications upon the Inter-net of Things (IoT) start to flourish, so does the environmental cost of the computational resources needed to send and process all the generated data. Therefore, promoting the optimization of AI applications is a key factor for the s...

Remote laboratories have been in use for 25 years now. Whereas several learning oriented meta-analyses exist, validated and agreed-upon tools for assessing the user experience are not readily available. The present paper fills this gap by designing and evaluating a questionnaire focused on the needs of remote labs developers and educators using the...

Educational remote laboratories allow users to access and control via the Internet remote equipment, that may be physically located anywhere in the world. They have a great potential for education, since they offer many advantages, such as cost reduction, high flexibility or the possibility of sharing equipment among institutions. However, their us...

During the last ten years, the University of Deusto is using VISIR remote lab for analog electronics in the Faculty of Engineering. Present paper shows how we are using the VISIR with students, and its results. It is a catalog of experiments to invite other universities to join the VISIR consortium. Ongoing and future research in VISIR are also pre...

The Universidad Estatal a Distancia (UNED) in Costa Rica is the public distance-education university in Costa Rica. It has been regularly using different types of remote laboratories since 2017, and is in the process of deploying new remote laboratories, as well as providing high quality simulations for improving the experimentation process in dist...

El projecte Go-Lab està finançat dins del Programa FP7 de la Unió Europea i el principal objectiu que persegueix és el de fomentar l’àrea STEM en alumnes joves preuniversitaris. En formen part una vintena de socis de més de 15 països i s’articula en tres grans eixos: pedagogia, tecnologia i desplegament en centres educatius. Pedagògicament es basa...

In response to users’ demand for privacy, trust and control over their data, executing machine learning tasks at the edge of the system has the potential to make the Internet of Things (IoT) applications and services more human-centric. This implies moving complex computation to a local stage, where edge devices must balance the computational cost...

The Universidad Estatal a Distancia (UNED) in Costa Rica is the public distance-education university in Costa Rica. It has been regularly using different types of remote laboratories since 2017, and is in the process of deploying new remote laboratories, as well as providing high quality simulations for improving the experimentation process in dist...

Remote laboratories are hardware and software tools that enable students to access real equipment through the Internet. Remote Laboratory Management Systems (RLMS) are software tools developed for creating remote laboratories in an easier way, providing some of the transversal features common in most remote labs (such as authentication, authorizati...

Online remote laboratories are a particularly promising tool for effective STEM education. They offer online universal access to different hardware devices in which students can experiment and can test and improve their knowledge. However, most of them have two significant limitations. First, given that most of them are developed as, or evolve from...

The potential of the Internet of Things (IoT) has traditionally grown upon the basis of its connectivity and communication capabilities, where low-power devices gather physical data and send them to remote high-performance nodes. However, the Edge Computing paradigm is changing the Cloud-based approach moving the processing and data computation tow...

Sustainability is currently a general concern in society and in particular in the use of laboratories for educational purposes. Although laboratories are unavoidable facilities for education, they often produce waste resulting from students' experiments. To contribute for sustainable solutions in education, the use of remote laboratories instead of...

Well-being at work is gaining an increasing importance on the overall health promotion as the workplace is considered an adequate setting to support health-related interventions reaching large audiences. In fact, an increasing number of initiatives are being carried out to influence employees towards healthier lifestyles in later years. However, de...

There is no doubt that experimental work is fundamental in the teaching of physics, however neither the accurate spaces nor the equipment for its fulfillment are always available. Taking into account the range of Remote Labs (RL) as resources for teaching and learning, the Open State University (UNED) from Costa Rica has started the Remote Testing...

Intelligent tutors and conversational agents have proven to be useful learning tools. They have potential not only as stand-alone devices but also as integrable components to enrich and complement other educational resources. For this, new authoring approaches and platforms are required. They should be accessible to non-programmers (such as most te...

The tool named WebLab-Boole-Deusto allows users to design and implement a bit-level combinational digital circuit. This tool helps students during the design process step by step: truth table, K-maps, Boolean minimization, Boolean expressions, and digital circuit. Also, students can access a remote lab for implementing and testing the system design...

The present paper focus on the use of remote laboratories in higher education from a sustainability viewpoint. The particular case of engineering education, and, within it, the more specific subject of experiments with electrical and electronic circuits is presented first, to then discuss the benefits of using remote labs, while considering the thr...

A remote laboratory is a hardware and software solution that enables students to interact with real equipment located somewhere else on the internet. This way, students interact with a real laboratory as if they were on a hands-on-lab session. Once the equipment is remote, it is also possible to share it among institutions, so students from one sch...

Health promotion in the workplace is one of the main challenges that the World Health Organization (WHO) has set in its agenda for the 21st century. Motivated by this concern, many companies across the world have reacted launching awareness campaigns and wellness promotion programs. One of the recurring problems on different application scenarios i...

Since the engagement of Universidad Nacional de Rosario (UNR) in the VISIR+ Project, several courses in the career of Electronic Engineering (EE) have incorporated experiments with electronic circuits based on VISIR remote lab. Three educational implementations in courses of the career of EE at UNR are introduced in this paper. Evaluation results a...

Experimenting is fundamental to the training process of all scientists and engineers. While experiments have been traditionally done inside laboratories, the emergence of Information and Communication Technologies added two alternatives accessible anytime, anywhere. These two alternatives are known as virtual and remote laboratories and are sometim...

WebLab-Deusto is an open-source Remote Laboratory Management System (RLMS). On top of it, one can develop and manage remote laboratories and share them with other institutions. This chapter describes the architecture and features of the system, as well as a nontechnical view of other aspects such as how to share laboratories in the context of WebLa...

Upgraded embedded systems and technologies are continuously appearing. Remote laboratories are an ever more promising technology that educators can use to train their students. However, they are still costly to develop and maintain. Most software and hardware architectures are tailored to specific hardware boards, and little can be reused when a la...

Interactive live streaming is a key feature of applications and platforms in which the actions of the viewers affect the content of the stream. In those, a minimal capture-display delay is critical. Though recent technological advances have certainly made it possible to provide web-based interactive live-streaming, little research is available that...

VISIR+ is an Erasmus+ project that aims to develop educational modules for electric and electronic circuits theory and practice following an enquiry-based teaching and learning methodology. The project has installed five new VISIR remote labs in Higher Education Institutions located in Argentina and Brazil, to allow students doing more experiments...

The VISIR+ Project was launched in 2015 with the objective of spreading the use of the VISIR remote laboratory in Latin America, promoting an enquiry-based approach to teaching and learning on electric and electronic circuits. Within the scope of this project, several didactical implementations were achieved both in Argentina and in Brazil. This ar...

En este trabajo se presenta una propuesta didáctica para facilitar el proceso de enseñanza y aprendizaje del tema circuitos eléctricos en la escuela media bajo la metodología por indagación. Esta metodología será implementada por el Ministerio de Educación Pública de Costa Rica a partir del año 2018. La propuesta se ha diseñado tomado en cuenta los...

A remote laboratory is a software and hardware tool that enables students to access real equipment located somewhere else through the Internet. This equipment is usually located in universities, schools or research centers. During the last couple of decades, different initiatives have emerged dealing with the development and management of remote la...

The learning of technical and science disciplines requires experimental and practical training. Hands-on labs are the natural scenarios where practical skills can be developed but, thanks to Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), virtual and remote labs can provide a framework where Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM)...

Programming is part of the curricula in different subjects and countries. To face this challenge, schools are using visual programming (e.g., Scratch, Blockly) and/or educational robots. Some combinations of these two tools are very popular, such as the Lego Mindstorm robots. This work presents a remote controlled robot called RoboBlock, and its ma...

This paper describes a new system developed to improve the import process of steel coils driven into a port terminal in the Port of Bilbao. A new RFID based system minimizes mistakes in identification of the coils during the inland movements of goods.

Experimental competences allow engineering students to consolidate knowledge and skills. Remote labs are a powerful tool to aid students in those developments. The VISIR remote lab was considered the best remote lab in the world in 2015. The VISIR+ project main goal is to spread VISIR usage in Brazil and Argentina, providing technical and didactica...

Resumen: Este trabajo describe una implementación didáctica del laboratorio remoto VISIR en el Instituto Politécnico Superior, en un curso de Física de nivel secundario con una estrategia de aprendizaje inductivo. El estudio presentado se enfoca en el análisis de la influencia de la herramienta utilizada en el entusiasmo de los estudiantes y en la...

La actividad experimental es fundamental en la enseñanza de las ciencias en cualquier nivel de educación, para la comprensión de los contenidos, pero también para despertar el interés en las asignaturas científicas. La motivación de los estudiantes y el trabajo colaborativo son aspectos esenciales para lograr resultados positivos en el aprendizaje....

“Virtual Instruments System in Reality” (VISIR) es una plataforma laboratorio de acceso remoto desarrollada en el Departamento de Ingeniería Electrónica del Instituto de Tecnología de Blekinge (BTH), Suecia. VISIR ha sido empleada y evaluada en varios países e instituciones en el mundo, reportándose en la bibliografía que la misma facilita el logro...

En este trabajo analizamos la idoneidad epistémica y cognitiva de una actividad implementada por un docente de Física con estudiantes universitarios de segundo año de carreras de ingeniería. La actividad propone utilizar la plataforma Visir (Laboratorio Remoto) para llevar a cabo experimentos con circuitos de corriente continua destinada a profundi...

The learning of Physics involves building up and using lab experiments. In turn, teachers must be trained in experimenting and using several resources that enable them to design valuable teaching strategies and learning activities. Thanks to Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), virtual and remote labs can provide a framework where phys...

Interactive live-streaming applications and platforms face particular challenges: the actions of the viewers affect the content of the stream. A minimal capture-render delay is critical. This is the case of applications such as remote laboratories, which allow students to view specific hardware through a webcam, and interact with it remotely in clo...

Experimental competences allow engineering students to consolidate knowledge and skills. Re-mote labs are a powerful tool to aid students in those developments. The VISIR remote lab was considered the best remote lab in the world in 2015. The VISIR+ project main goal is to spread VISIR usage in Brazil and Argentina, providing technical and didactic...

Experiments have been at the heart of scientific development and education for centuries. From the outburst of Information and Communication Technologies, virtual and remote labs have added to hands-on labs a new conception of practical experience, especially in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics education. This paper aims at describi...

Remote laboratories give students the opportunity of experimenting in STEM by using the Internet to control and measure an experimental setting. Remote laboratories are increasingly used in the classroom to complement, or substitute for, hands-on laboratories, so it is important to know its learning value. While many authors approach this question...

A remote laboratory is a software and hardware tool that enables students to access real equipment located somewhere else through the Internet. The laboratories are typically deployed in universities or research centers. A key factor of remote laboratories is that once they are available through the Internet their usage can be scaled up and used by...

Online laboratories have traditionally been split between virtual labs, with simulated components; and remote labs, with real components. The former tend to provide less realism but to be easily scalable and less expensive to maintain, while the latter are fully real but tend to require a higher maintenance effort and be more error-prone. This tech...

En este artículo se presenta un estudio exploratorio realizado con el fin de indagar el interés de docentes de física de asistir a capacitaciones enfocadas en el uso educativo de Laboratorios Remotos para realizar actividades experimentales en la escuela secundaria costarricense. Para cumplir con este objetivo, se aplicó un instrumento autoadminist...

The use of remote laboratories has been received with great interest in secondary schools since these resources are seen as a great chance to convert into practice theoretical contents, especially in areas such as electronics, robotics or control systems. In this publication the benefits from their usage and the rationale for the inclusion of these...

Present paper presents a new approach to the deployment of remote laboratories over embedded technologies. New proposed architecture allows to perform the main stages in the experimentation with embedded systems including compilation and debugging. The design of the architecture provides scalability and replicability over different technologies. A...

Experimental activities with real components are an essential part of all courses including or devoted to electrical and electronic circuits theory and practice. The knowledge triangle composed of hand-written exercises, simulations and traditional lab experiments has been enriched with the possibility for students to conduct real experiments over...

Students of technological fields must practice so as to properly learn a particular field. There are different ways to practice: hands-on-lab in a real environment or a mockup, datasets (and tools for analyzing these datasets), or simulations. Each solution provides different advantages and disadvantages. For example, students might not prefer simu...

The use of high accuracy positioning systems provides endless possibilities for the development of remote laboratories. The remote laboratory presented in this paper allows full control of a microscope over a surface by the use of a Cartesian positioning system. The arrangement of multiple samples over the accessible surface by the lens so far as t...

Research in virtual environments, gamification and serious-games suggests that those tools can be very effective for education, and that in certain contexts they provide unique advantages. Recent advances are making the technologies they are based on more widespread, with technologies such as 3D becoming widely available through web browsers and ev...

A new system for building and measuring real analog electronic circuits has been developed and validated in the area of remote laboratories. The innovation of this work lies in the use of standardized solutions and non-proprietary solutions for designing and developing remote labs. This decision facilitates and improves the set-up, maintenance and...

This paper is the editorial for the TAEE special issue of the RITA journal. This special issue is devoted to improve the teaching/learning process in electronics using different technologies and approaches.

The use of didactic models in industrial engineering provides students with an enhanced experimental environment to design in accordance with industrial requirements. The high cost of industrial models promotes its deployment as a remote experiment. The system presented in this paper allows real experimentation through the Internet over an industri...