Virtual and remote labs in education: A bibliometric analysis
Graphical abstract
Introduction
Experimentation plays an essential role in engineering and scientific education. Whereas traditional hands-on labs offer students opportunities of experimentation with real systems (i.e., they provide “actual experience”), they involve high costs associated with equipment, space, and maintenance staff (Gomes & Bogosyan, 2009). Accordingly, new types of labs are being proposed. To characterize the different modalities of all available experimentation environments, two criteria were proposed in (Dormido, 2004):
- 1.
According to the way resources are accessed for experimental purposes, environments can be remote or local.
- 2.
According to the physical nature of the lab, environments can be simulated or real plants.
By combining those criteria, there can be four types of experimentation environments:
- 1.
Local access-real resource. This combination represents traditional hands-on labs, where the student is in front of a computer connected to the real plant.
- 2.
Local access-simulated resource. The whole environment is software and the experimentation interface works on a simulated, virtual and physically non-existent resource, which together with the interface is part of the computer. This configuration could be defined as a mono-user virtual lab.
- 3.
Remote access-real resource. Real plant equipment is accessed through the Internet. The user remotely operates and controls a real plant through an experimentation interface. This approach is named remote lab.
- 4.
Remote access-simulated resource. This form of experimentation is similar to the one above, but replacing the physical system with a model. The student operates with the experimentation interface on a virtual system reached through the Internet. The basic difference is that several users can operate simultaneously with the same virtual system. As it is a simulated process, it can be instantiated to serve anyone who asks for it. Thus, we have a multi-user virtual lab.
Virtual and Remote Labs (VRLs) not only enable reducing costs, but they provide other important benefits (Gravier, Fayolle, Bayard, Ates, & Lardon, 2008):
- 1.
Availability: VRLs can be used from anywhere at anytime, thus they support students geographically scattered, who besides are conditioned to different time zones.
- 2.
Accessibility for handicapped people.
- 3.
Observability: lab sessions can be watched by many people or even recorded.
- 4.
Safety: VRLs can be a better alternative to hands-on labs for dangerous experimentation.
Nowadays, the use of VRLs is spreading across a variety of domains and educational degrees (Azad et al., 2011, Dziabenko and García-Zubía, 2013, Fjeldly and Shur, 2003, García-Zubía and Alves, 2012, Gomes and García-Zubía, 2007). As a result, their research community and its scientific paper production has increased dramatically. This paper tries to provide a panoramic view on the research on VRLs by analyzing, through bibliometric techniques (Martin et al., 2011), the vast literature published on VRLs from its beginnings in 1993–2015. The outcomes of this analysis offer information regarding the following issues:
- 1.
How numerous is the literature on VRLs? How has paper publication been distributed over the time?
- 2.
Which are the most influential papers on VRLs?
- 3.
Who are the most prolific authors? Who are the most relevant ones?
- 4.
Which journals, conferences, etc. have published the majority of the papers? Which ones have received most citations?
- 5.
Which are the main topics studied in the area? How has the interest in those topics evolved with time?
- 6.
Which are the most impacting papers for a given topic along a certain period of time?
4422 records retrieved from GRC2014 (Zappatore, Longo, & Bochicchio, 2015), ISI Web of Science (ISIWoS) and Scopus have been processed using two approaches to examine bibliographical data: performance analysis (Garfield, 1977) and science mapping (Callon, Courtial, & Laville, 1991).
Performance analysis tries to quantify the impact of scientific actors (researchers, journals, etc.) on a research field by measuring how often a paper is cited. In particular, this paper uses H-index (Hirsch, 2005) to measure publication impact, which is one of the most popular indicators for citation analysis.
Science mapping attempts to display the structural and dynamic aspects of scientific research, delimiting a research field, and identifying, quantifying and visualizing its thematic subfields. To map the VRL research area, we have used a technique called co-word analysis, that measures the association strengths of publication keywords (Coulter, Monarch, & Konda, 1998).
Our work uses both performance analysis and science mapping in a complementary way. Science mapping supports visualizing the main topics in the literature, their evolutions and inter-relationships. Performance analysis helps to identify the most productive topics (in terms of number of published papers), and the most impacting ones (according to received citations).
The remainder of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 summarizes the goals and educational context of this paper. Section 3 describes the methodology used to carry out our work. Section 4 reports the performance analysis of the whole VRL research area, identifying those papers that, due to their number of citations, should be considered as classics. Section 5 applies science mapping techniques to identify the cognitive structure and evolution of the literature on VRLs. Section 6 discusses the limitations inherent to the methodology we have applied, and it justifies the decisions taken to overcome such limitations. Finally, some concluding remarks are provided in Section 7.
Section snippets
Educational context and aim of our work
There is a general consensus on the benefits of hands-on labs to teach science and engineering (Chen, 2010, Corter et al., 2004, Ma and Nickerson, Singer et al., 2006). However, some works have raised questions on the educational value of VRLs. For example, hands-on labs are specially important to acquire haptic skills and instrumentation awareness, which are very difficult to obtain via VRLs (Abdulwahed & Nagy, 2011).
Nevertheless, different empirical studies have shown that VRLs enable
Materials and methods
To undertake the bibliometric analysis described in this paper, the workflow proposed in (Börner et al., 2003, Cobo et al., 2011a) has been used, which is composed of the following steps:
- 1.
Data retrieval. The starting point of our analysis was GRC2014, a bibliographical database specifically dedicated to VRLs, which was created by Zappatore et al. (2015). Unfortunately, GRC2014 has the following drawbacks:
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It covers a short time span. It just includes records on papers for the time span 2008–2013.
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Performance analysis
The main approach to evaluate research performance is paper citation analysis (Moed, 2009), whose main tenet is “the more often a paper becomes cited, the greater its influence on the field” (Garfield, 1979). One of the most popular indicators for citation analysis is H-index, which was introduced by Hirsch (2005) to measure the scientific performance of a researcher through her publications. Its original definition is:
“a scientist has index h if h of her n papers have at least h citations
Science mapping
In this paper, a particular science mapping approach known as co-word analysis has been used to identify the main topics of a scientific field and their inter-relationship. It measures the association strengths of terms representative of the publications in the field by analyzing the co-occurrence frequency of pairs of keywords. Several measures have been proposed to estimate the association strength between publication keywords. van Eck and Waltman (2009) performed an analysis of many of those
Discussion on the applied methodology
The following points discuss the limitations inherent to the methodology used in this paper, and they also justify the decisions taken to overcome such limitations:
- 1.
Query to gather the bibliographical data. As mentioned in Section 3, the database GRC2014, provided by Zappatore et al. (2015), has been used as the initial bibliographical collection for our work. To enrich that database with citation information, and to widen that collection with new papers, we performed the query in Fig. 1 on
Concluding remarks
As a result of more than twenty years of research, VRLs have reached such a maturity degree that makes possible their current application to a variety of educational scenarios (primary schools, higher education, universities, distance learning, etc.) for learning a diversity of subjects (engineering, physics, chemistry, etc.).
Since 2005, the production of scientific papers on VRLs has grown dramatically. At the moment, more than four thousand articles on VRLs have been published. In this paper,
Acknowledgements
This work has been supported by Project DPI2012-31303 (financed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness), Project TIN2013-40658-P (financed by FEDER), and the Andalusian Excellence Project TIC-5991.
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