Implementing remote laboratories for digital electronics: foundations for distance learning and resource sharing

This thesis presents the design, implementation and development of an online laboratory for digital electronics which will serve as an extension of the traditional laboratory and therefore be available for various distance learning purposes. This thesis also seeks to develop a platform for universities to adopt when it comes to laboratory resource sharing among institutions and also for use in distance learning. This digital electronics experiment involves using a simple encoder-multiplexer circuit connection where users will be required to determine an unknown input to the multiplexer. However, this experiment never dwelled on the details of digital electronics, but rather it acts as a proof of concept for how remote/online laboratories can be implemented and adopted in any engineering/science discipline. Remote laboratories are not new, there have been many papers which have discussed and implemented online experiments for over 16 years and in fact a number of universities have developed their own laboratories but many of them do not have a technique for in place for ensuring that students or users adhere to the same trainings as they would get if they were to perform such experiments in a real academic laboratory. In this present thesis, a technique is used for ensuring that the students go through a short mandatory introduction to the lab experiment before they perform their work. There is an authentication phase where the student has the sufficient information in accessing the lab by observing a video. Moreover, an advantage regarding this is the student cannot skip or ignore this video until they watch it at least once. Why this is important is because this remote laboratory is supposed to be a replica of a real laboratory, therefore students should be able to partake in what it feels like to be in a typical laboratory session. A simple experiment was implemented in this thesis so that students with some science/engineering background can partake in it without any form of supervision