ScienceDirect IFAC-PapersOnLine 48-29 (2015) 301–306 ScienceDirect Available online at www.sciencedirect.com 2405-8963 © 2015, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Peer review under responsibility of International Federation of Automatic Control. 10.1016/j.ifacol.2015.11.252 © 2015, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Education Laboratory, Laboratory Techniques, Control Education, Motor Control, PID Controllers. 1. INTRODUCTION The Proportional-Integral-Derivative control is one of the controllers most frequently used in industrial control system so it is an always present content in the curriculum of automation students. Many laboratories have been developed based on PID controller to ensure that students fully understand its operation (Dormido, 2008). Students of engineering degrees have done their laboratory practices in various ways depending on the type of laboratory. Nowadays, students can work in different types of laboratories: hands-on, virtual, remote, hybrid, virtual reality, etc. The WebLabs are laboratories (virtual, remote or hybrid) that are offered to students via a website and the Learning Management Systems (LMS) are the most widely used web platforms for e-learning in higher education. Almost all educational institutions, naturally including universities, use LMS to deliver online and blended/hybrid courses or improve the possibilities of the on-campus courses. This article presents a WebLab whose main objective is to help students to understand the operation of PID control and learn to tune a P, a PD and a PI controller for a DC motor from a given specifications. The WebLab is formatted as a Shared Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) package (ADL, 2009) that can be uploaded in any SCORM- conformant LMS and interacts with it. SCORM is a collection of standards and specifications used to define e- learning contents that is supported by most of the LMS. Inside the WebLab there are four pages where students can find useful resources related to the PID control virtual lab. The student can navigate between these pages accessing to the resources through a learning path that has been programmed in a sequence. This sequence can be modified depending on the actions performed by the learners and their marks. Each page in the WebLab includes an automatic assessment whose result is recorded in the LMS and can later be viewed by the course teachers. The virtual Lab (VL) is a java Applet developed with Easy Java Simulations (EJS) (Esquembre, 2003) that is embedded in the third page of the WebLab. It communicates with the LMS through the SCORM Run Time Environment (RTE) sub-specification to obtain the learner identification. Each time a learner runs the VL, it offers three customized experiments based on the user identification, it records in the LMS the marks obtained by the learner and some comments about the work performed by the learner in each attempt. The learner can recover these comments during the current run of the VL or in subsequent runs of the software. This WebLab has been presented to 340 students of the “Industrial Automation” subject of the University of Jaén in the 2014-15 course. Students were divided initially into two groups (control group and experimental group) in order to analyse the performance and effectiveness of the laboratory in various scenarios. The results demonstrate that student Abstract: Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controller is an essential content of the Automation subjects in many Engineering degrees. The PID controller theory should be supported by some practices that help students to bring the “real world” into an otherwise theoretical education. This paper presents a PID Control WebLab that has been developed with a set of related learning resources using an innovative methodology. Traditional laboratories lessons have been adapted to an e-learning strategy based on a virtual laboratory embedded into a Shared Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) package along with a set of related learning resources. The result is a SCORM package including a learning path with specific theory, tests and a series of experiments where the assessment of the work performed by each student is recorded in the Learning Management System (LMS). The package itself constitutes a learning resource that can be reused in any SCORM supported LMS. This PID Control WebLab has been offered to 340 students of the “Industrial Automation” subject of the University of Jaén in the 2014-15 course. Several evaluations of this WebLab, also included in this paper, demonstrate that this proposal has produced excellent results in the knowledge obtained by the students, the WebLab has helped students to pass the subject final exam and it has been highly regarded by its users: the learners. Group of Robotic, Automation and Computer Vision (GRAV), University of Jaén, Jaén, 23071 Spain (Tel: +34 953212448; e-mail: alonso@ujaen.es). Ruano Ruano, I., Cano Marchal, P., Gámez García, J., Gómez Ortega, J. PID Control WebLab with LMS Integration Using SCORM