The UbiLAB Project is proposing a concept of a unified UbiLAB framework designed in the cloud envisioned as a gateway to remote and virtual laboratories that would provide a nearly realistic substitute for students’ learning experiences in the actual physical laboratories.
The Covid-19 (SARS-CoV-2) Pandemic has sparked the need for fast and widespread response in many areas of current ways of living, learning, and doing business. The current Pandemic presents not only a health risk but has a negative impact on all aspects of life. Many custom daily routines have changed and are not custom anymore. What was “normal” just several months ago, now is almost unreachable. The restrictions of grouping, especially in closed and contained spaces, has influenced many industries, and among the most affected are education systems worldwide, and on any level. Taking into consideration that education is one of the pillars of human rights, enabling and providing quality education for young generations is inevitably one of the most important issues that have to be addressed in the world, and immediately. Thus, our project is aimed towards the generations of students and young professionals that have the RIGHT to good quality education, and we, the educators, are obliged to provide it.
The everyday advancements of technology are enabling the digitalization of our society, but not each and every aspect can be easily and seamlessly digitized. While taking the teaching classes online, using readily available digital video tools, was a swift change, not every aspect of teaching can be realized the same way. Considering the limitations imposed by the Covid-19 Pandemic, the presence of students in the laboratories is significantly limited. Consequently, we identify that the most affected aspect of students’ study experience are the laboratory experiments that used to be conducted on site, in the laboratories.
In this project, we will be working towards implementing digital technologies in the process of laboratory work and experiments. These are rarely completely transferred into the digital world. The benefits of actual physical presence in the laboratories, the hands on experience, the tangible work with real instruments and systems, as well as the collaborative learning aspect are still unprecedented. Nevertheless, today’s challenges have pushed forward the need to explore down this road and provide as good solutions as possible. Taking into account the learning experience educators are used to providing their students, we have identified two most difficult challenges: a nearly realistic substitute for learning experiences in the actual physical laboratories and a neary realistic substitute for the social element of collaborative learning and “making friends” in the process.
Our project envisions an innovative framework, designed to support different types of endpoints: hardware devices, virtual devices, software solutions. We consider the results of this project would not be beneficial just to university students, but could be simplified and easily transferred to students of younger age, or could be further developed and transferred in real work and research environments, enabling a more realistic experience in the digital world.
By successfully realizing the Project’s elements, we expect that the UbiLAB project would succeed in producing its main result – a freely available open-source UbiLAB framework for digital remote and virtual laboratories. At first, it will be directly applicable to technical universities, but expandable to address digitalization issues in many other departments (technology, medicine, civil engineering, architecture). Finally, the UbiLAB project will enable the exchange of good practices within the European partners. The establishment of the UbiLAB framework will then contribute to the advancement of conducting laboratory experiments and research in the virtual world, strengthening Europe’s digital capacities.