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 within a distributed system running on three hosts: web client machine, Virtual Laboratory server and the machine connected to the (real) resource.
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. '