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Abstract Traditional laboratories in engineering education are supervised by a tutor. Students can get feedback on their progress and hints when in need of help from the tutor. Often the tutor will grade the laboratory work. This support is also needed when students work with a remotely controlled laboratory. We believe that live audio-video is a natural way for tutors and students to communicate over a distance. The tutor should be able to see the students ’ computer screen to understand the work situation. We have built a remote laboratory to teach remote maintenance and real time Java programming of embedded systems. It supports synchronous audio-video communication with the tutor. Application sharing is provided by an external tool. The laboratory is used by university students of electrical engineering and computer science. The educational concept is problem based and self-directed learning. Students work in groups of two with the experiment and write a program that controls the deflection unit of a laser system and generates a picture. They observe the generated picture and the lab devices by a user-controlled web cam. We want to make students self-directed in their learning so that they get maximum responsibility and control over their learning process. The ability to learn self-directed is an important factor for success in life long learning. In a comparative evaluation we investigate how well self-directed learning works in our remote laboratory setting. We have developed two instructional designs for the evaluation: In the self-directed setting the student group set own learning goals after some predetermined tasks. The tutor acts as E-Coach or E-Moderator. In the teacher directed setting the tasks are given and the tutor acts as E-Instructor. We are currently evaluating student motivation, task success and the consulting effort of the tutor comparing these two settings. Index Terms remote laboratory, remote programming, self-directed learning, tele- tutorial assistanc