Remote Intelligent Access to Labs in Higher Education (RIALHE) aims to improve the students’ understanding of scientific procedures starting from remote access to real lab experiments followed by collaborative activities using tech platforms.

Lab work is a key aspect of scientific education and students can seldom access public and private labs of excellence. While several Erasmus+ projects and national initiatives have focused on digital L&T, our project is innovative in addressing a pedagogical framework (RIALHE) for lab training as a particular field.

Despite providing scientific labs, many educational bodies lack the resources to meet the costs of reagents or maintenance. Digitising the hardware components of a lab is complicated and costly. In the context of virtual labs, where the experiment is simulated, students face situations where aspects of the procedures remain hidden because simulations do not address contingencies or measurement errors. A lab operator needs to address such situations that are present in a real-life experiment.

Acquiring this ability is an important part of the learning process that is lost in the over-idealized virtual world. An innovative methodology, shared at European level, implies the elaboration of basic competencies including gaining familiarity with cutting edge lab equipment not necessarily accessible to all academic institutions.

Objectives

1. Improve both the quality and relevance of Higher Education laboratory activities for all partners by providing remote access to state of the art laboratory environments and by opening up to new actors, not normally involved in the educational paths.

2. Increase partners’ capacity to operate jointly at a transnational level creating and developing synergies through the establishment of a common framework that uses participatory approaches and digital methodologies.

3. Boost the internationalisation of the partners’ activities, through exchanging and developing new practices and methods, and through sharing and confronting ideas.