The NMC Horizon Report lists Virtual and Remote Laboratories as one of the most important future technologies in learning. In the last years, considerable advances have been made regarding the design and development of Educational Online Laboratories. These Laboratories are accessible via the Internet 24 hours on all days a year. Active learning by means of online laboratories is especially valuable for blended learning approaches. Students can access remote laboratories from any place at any time. This flexibility is important for education and further education and for lifelong learning. Especially in Engineering Education there is an enormous educational value in hands-on laboratory experiences. But conventional labs are becoming increasingly expensive, have complex logistics and can't be easily shared. Using Online Laboratories has the potential of significantly reducing obstacles related of cost, time-inefficient use of facilities, inadequate technical support and limited access to laboratories. This is especially important for Engineering Education in developing nations. Different solutions and technologies exist today to implement Online Laboratories as well as different communication standards and data exchange protocols. Therefore, each Institution/University is likely to adopt its own standards and approaches. Because of that, sharing remote Labs becomes difficult. For a global and joint further development of a global cloud solution the "Global Online Laboratory Consortium" – GOLC - has been established. A group of enthusiasts and visionaries met already in June 2009 at MIT and discussed the objectives and principles of such an association. Finally in June 2010 GOLC was official founded. The GOLC strategic objectives are: - to encourage and support the creation of new online labs and associated curricular materials; - to sponsor the design of an efficient mechanism for sharing, exchanging and trading access to online labs by creation of a global network of shareable experiments (iLab Cloud) - to support communities of scholars created around online laboratories; and By means of the iLab Consortium GOLC helps to make Global Learning in Engineering a reality. Within a continually growing cloud, based on MIT iLabs, iLab Europe, iLab Africa (Morocco, Tunisia, Uganda, Nigeria, ..) and iLabs in Australia, Online Laboratories are freely available for educational institutions.

It is a well-known fact that the word "engineer" originates from Latin "ingenium" meaning "abilities". Two-three centuries ago it was borrowed by many European languages from Old French "engigneor" that at the beginning of the twelfth century denoted "architect, creator of military devices" (Online etymology dictionary. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php . Accessed 15 June 2022.).

Social demands have promoted an educational approach based on an “anywhere and anytime” premise. Remote laboratories have emerged as the answer to the demands of technical educational areas for adapting themselves to this scenario. The result has not only benefit distance learning students but has provided new learning scenarios both for teachers and students as well as allowing a flexible approach to experimental topics. However, as any other solution for providing practical scenarios (hands-on labs, virtual labs or simulators), remote labs face several constraints inherited from the subsystems of its deployment —hardware (real instruments, equipment and scenario) and software (analog/digital conversions, communications, workbenches, etc.)—. This paper describes the Erasmus+ project Platform Integration of Laboratories based on the Architecture of visiR (PILAR) which deals with several units of the federation installed in different educational institutions and devoted to analog electronics and electrical circuits. Based on the limitations of remote labs, the need for the federation will be justified and its benefits will be described.

Social demands have promoted an educational approach based on an “anywhere and anytime” premise. Remote laboratories have emerged as the answer to the demands of technical educational areas for adapting themselves to this scenario. The result has not only benefit distance learning students but has provided new learning scenarios both for teachers and students as well as allowing a flexible approach to experimental topics. However, as any other solution for providing practical scenarios (hands-on labs, virtual labs or simulators), remote labs face several constraints inherited from the subsystems of its deployment - hardware (real instruments, equipment and scenario) and software (analog/digital conversions, communications, workbenches, etc.}. This paper describes the Erasmus+ project Platform Integration of Laboratories based on the Architecture of visiR (PILAR) which deals with several units of the federation installed in different educational institutions and devoted to analog electronics and electrical circuits. Based on the limitations of remote labs, the need for the federation will be justified and its benefits will be described by taking advantage of its strengths. The challenges that have come up during the different stages and the different approaches to design are also going to be described and analyzed.

The PILAR (Platform Integration of Laboratories based on the Architecture of visiR) Erasmus Plus project started in September 2016 and will last three years. The core of the PILAR project is the VISIR remote laboratory -Virtual Instruments System In Reality-. The project aims for a federation of five of the existing VISIR nodes, sharing experiments, capacity and resources among partners, and to provide access to VISIR remote lab, through PILAR consortium, to students from other educational institutions. PILAR will be the framework from which management tasks will be performed and laboratories/experiments will be shared. PILAR will also foster the Special Interest Group of VISIR under the Global Online Laboratory Consortium (GOLC) of the International Association of Online Engineering (IAOE).

Educational tool is one of the prominent solutions for aiding students to learn course material in Information Technology (IT) domain. However, most of them are not used in practice since they do not properly fit student necessity. This paper evaluates the impact of an educational tool, namely PythonTutor, for completing programming laboratory task regarding data structure materials. Such evaluation will be conducted in one semester by implementing a quasi-experimental design. As a result, six findings can be deducted which are: 1) PythonTutor might positively affect student performance when the students have used such tool before; 2) Sometimes, student perspective regarding the impact of educational tool is not always in-sync with actual laboratory result; 3) the impact of PythonTutor might be improved when similar data representation is used consequently for several weeks; 4) the correlation between the use of PythonTutor and student performance might not be significant when the control and intervened group share completely different characteristics; 5) the students might experience some difficulties when they are asked to handle a big task for the first time; and 6) the students might be able to complete a particular weekly task with a promising result if the students have understood the material well. Keywords—quasi-experimental design, empirical evaluation, program visualization, educational tool, laboratory session

This book investigates how to develop an online laboratory system that can deliver its true potential in the national and global arenas.