A Scheduling System for Shared Online Laboratory Resources
Li, Y., Esche, S. K. & Chassapis, C.
Proceedings of the 38th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, Saratoga Springs, New York, USA, October 22 - 25, 2008.
Abstract
With the rise in popularity of the Internet, educational engineering and science laboratories that are accessible online in the form of remote experiments or virtual experiments are increasingly gaining acceptance for deployment in traditional on-campus as well as Web-based distance-learning classes around the world.
Recently, attempts are beginning to be made by various educational institutions to leverage their online laboratory developments by broadly sharing them across institutional boundaries.
While virtual experiments represent software simulations that are typically scalable (i.e. suitable for concurrent usage by multiple users), many remote experiments based on actual hardware can only be used by one person or group of persons at a time.
This paper will describe the design and implementation of a scheduling system for shared online laboratory resources, which can be employed to coordinate reservations of usage time for these resources by multiple geographically dispersed users.
If a particular resource is currently available, then a potential user is enabled by this scheduling system to use it right away.
Alternatively, future time slots for this resource can be reserved if it is currently unavailable.
Furthermore, this scheduling system was designed with integrated functionality for handling various priority levels for the user requests.
This approach facilitates different modes of usage, such as experimental demonstrations during a life class by an instructor and experimental procedures carried out either individually by one user or collaboratively by multiple users.
This paper will discuss in detail the logic behind the scheduling approach and presents a prototype implementation.
This software module can also be integrated as part of a more general Web-based management system for online laboratory resources, which enables the standardized description of and efficient search for such resources.
Collectively, such cyber-tools have the potential for laying the foundation for fundamental changes in engineering and science laboratory education.