[MUSIC] iLabs is an online system that enables real laboratory equipment to be operated remotely through the Internet. In this case study, Dr. Mark Schultz from the University of Queensland, demonstrates iLabs. It talks about how its institution has developed experiments using this institution, that have become a rich online resource for science students and teachers around the world. >> What we're providing is remote access to computerized experimental gear. iLabs were developed by MIT probably about 12 years ago, Jesus A. del Alamo and Steven R. Lerman got a grant to puts some experiments online. And the insight they had was not that putting the experiment online was the great thing, but how did you control access to it? How did you scale this up? I didn't want it just for a class of five or 20 or 100 students. But what happens if I wanted it for a class of 10,000 students who were geographically distributed all over the planet? We'd had problems with students doing pracs way before the material or way after because we only had N of the pieces of equipment and we were looking for a better way. So the last job I'd done was built two labs with 50 bench positions in at the cost of $400,000. And we knew we were never going to get this money ever again. So we needed a way of better sharing the equipment we had. And we saw remote labs as a way around that. That if we could give students access out of hours, over weekends that could run it from their home at times of their convenience. That's not applications you download into your computer. The objective is to run it in the browser. So it should run anywhere, anytime. iLabCentral.org. The experiment they're running is basically to do the inverse square law so that if you double the distance from the source, you'll get a quarter of the radiation. What they've done is set up some activities before the students come here. Before the students go in. And then they can launch the experiment. In all of these we've seen this is the same experiment. They just set up the scenario differently and the activity afterwards will be different. But the running of the experiment looks the same each time. So when you invoke it you say, launch the lab. It tells you that the experiment's located in Australia. So there's a, a you can click to look at the webcams, so we can and we can see that's the lab there. This is the pedagogy they're following. Where they pick a question, they design an experiment, and they go through and investigate it, interpret it. And they have to fill in a book. And finally, they get to this point. Here's our radiation source down at the bottom, here's our Geiger muller tube, here's the tonic particles going up and ionizing and being, and registered. And you can choose the source, we've only got one plugged in at the movements it's strotium-90, but the main thing they can do is move the source closer to it and you can see more particles get captured here or get measured. If they move right out to the full distance, you get less in here. The journal here takes them through the steps then that are required. So they have to understand these things and there's questions about it. And then they work their way through the activity. So I'm going to enter some distances now between 15 and 90 millimeters. And 90. How long do we want to do it for? Probably three seconds each and we'd like to do it three times; so it's now running the experiment. They can hit the webcam and have a look at it; and the wheel's spinning down the bottom if your eyes are quick. It'll do the readings and then you'll see the, this gear here rise up some distance and then it will take another set of readings. [NOISE] Moving up now. It does that measurement there which is going to take whatever it is a few seconds and then it will move up to the top and it'll do it again. So now we can get our results. [BLANK_AUDIO] So, then the distance is, we took three readings. That isn't the answer, that's the raw data they've got so now they should go along and analyze that. So, they've plotted the, the three numbers there, and now you can insert the graph back into your lab book, and then we're supposed to interpret it. So that's what somebody else has done with the piece of equipment we developed. Now if we go back to browse iLabs so you'll see the radiation one crops up a lot. There's a large number of experiments out there that people have done, all of these run under the iLab architecture. ELVIS is a platform available from National Instruments. Force on a Dipole is out of physics at MIT. Spectrometer experiment from Chemistry. Inverted Pendulum was the first experiment we did. Shake Table is from Civil Engineering. The Neutron Beam runs inside the reactor at MIT. I mean, this is a prime example of why we like iLab experiments. This experiment can't be done by anybody except the few people that might be allowed in that room, and they don't allow undergrads into that room. It's a high risk experiment, it's a fantastic experiment to do, but not everybody can do it. Not many universities have their own reactor. And not many people are allowed into that sort of space. So the radiation experiment we've just been looking at is unique in that high schools can't do it, because you have to have a radiation officer, to lock the sources away, and bring them out, all the time. And you've gotta be a certified radiation officer. Primary schools and hospitals couldn't do it, so this experiment would allow them to do a radiation experiment. It doesn't detract from the lab experience; you still need to go into a lab and do things, you need to spill chemicals, you need to melt wires, you need to blow up the capacitors in your training and get that tactile, haptic experience of how do you tweak knobs and what happens. That's still part of your training. This enriches that and provides opportunities you couldn't normally do. Remote experiments have been around for probably over 20 years. But they haven't been large scale. So we're trying to move them more mainstream. We were focused on first year Physics at UQ. They've taken it into a whole new market. So that radiation experiment at the moment is used by, I think 1460 high school students across six states in the US. There were students who came back to after their submitted their solution and kept working. So we really had got amazing engagement. The next level of development is, can we collaborate over an experiment at MIT where the people are in China or India or Australia and, Germany. [BLANK_AUDIO]