Toward Virtual Campuses: Collaborative Virtual Labs & Personalized Learning Services in a Real-Life Context

Virtual campuses are gradually becoming a reality with the advances in e-learning and Web technologies, distributed systems and broadband communication, as well as the emerging needs of remote Universities for collaboration on offering common programs. The advances in grid-based distributed infrastructures have further significantly contributed to this fact providing optimized and real-time system performance and support for virtual communities even under synchronous distributed multi-user usage contexts executing complex simulations in virtual lab applications. This paper focuses on realizing fundamental rich-media e-learning services for synchronous shared and interactive virtual labs offerings and asynchronous personalized learning paradigms towards enabling virtual campuses in a real-life context. The paper further presents evaluation results of the developed e-learning services on both learning and usability aspects in real-life learning contexts involving participation of student communities from remote collaborating Universities. The evaluation results showcase the interest of learning communities in such systems as they evolve to be more advanced and user-friendly and their impact in realizing virtual campuses. KEY WORDS Scientific web-based laboratories and virtual labs, virtual universities and colleges, e-learning, virtual campu