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Chapter 11
INTRODUCTION
The evolution of the Internet has changed the
education landscape drastically (Bourne et al.
2005, Rosen 2007). What was once considered
distance education is now called online education.
In other words, the method of teaching and learn-
ing is based on the use of the Internet to complete
educational activities. A specific example of this
new teaching model is the Spanish University for
Distance Education (UNED). Compared to other
Spanish universities, this institution has the largest
number of students because distance education
allows students to obtain a degree or improve
Sebastián Dormido
Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Spain
Héctor Vargas
Pontifcia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile
José Sánchez
Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Spain
AutomatL@bs Consortium:
A Spanish Network of Web-Based Labs
for Control Engineering Education
ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the effort of a group of Spanish universities to unify recent work on the use of
Web-based technologies in teaching and learning engineering topics. The network was intended to be a
space where students and educators could interact and collaborate with each other as well as a meeting
space for different research groups working on these subjects. The solution adopted in this chapter goes
one step beyond the typical scenario of Web-based labs in engineering education (where research-groups
demonstrate their engineering designs in an isolated fashion) by sharing the experimentation resources
provided by different research groups that participated in this network. Finally, this work highlights the
key points of this project and provides some remarks about the future use of Web-based technologies in
school environments.
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-61350-186-3.ch011