Virtual Laboratory-Agent-Based Resource Sharing System

In this study, we extend the concept of distance education and our Virtual Classroom with adding a new service, that we call Virtual Laboratory. While the Virtual Classroom represents an interface between the students and a virtual professor and provides personalized learning materials to the users, the Virtual Laboratory offers a possibility to the attendees to share different resources out of time and space boundaries. It enables geographically separated users to effectively facilitate remote access to various, presumably diverse, (real) resources. The Virtual Laboratory is implemented with three key points in mind: modularity, reusability and common interface handling. Using object-oriented approach in the development of the VL service, we made a modular system, capable of managing various resources that can possibly be shared through VL. By using common interfaces that each resource-specific agent must implement, many different resources that possibly have nothing in common can be shared through the same VL service. The first experiments show that users are satisfied with the Virtual Laboratory's usability. They found Virtual Laboratory as a very convenient service within the Distance Education Systems.