Another technological innovation that looks very promising, among many others at MIT, is the iLab project. According to the MITCET web site, the goal of iLab, which is part of an MIT-Microsoft Alliance called iCampus, is to "deliver the educational benefits of hands-on experimentation to students anywhere, at any time."

"iLab basically asks why can’t we give people remote access to laboratory equipment?" says Hal Abelson, professor of computer science and engineering. "You just take this lab equipment and make it web accessible."

For example, MIT has expensive network analyzer laboratory equipment that is used inside the Institute’s microelectronics courses for various experiments, such as measuring characterizations of transistors. "What we have done is taken those instruments and put a web interface on them, so students anyplace on campus can use this," says Abelson. "Because the experiment is easily set up, they don’t have to physically come to the lab. It is arranged so that the physical set-up is already done, and it is just putting in the signal that they want to pump through the transistor. That means you can do the experiment in about a minute or two, so you get incredibly higher utilization of this lab equipment."

The next step, says Abelson, is to make it so anybody from anywhere in the world can share lab equipment. For example, the Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA), which is an innovative distance education collaboration among MIT and Singapore’s top universities - the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University - is currently utilizing iLab technology in one of its online courses.

"You can imagine that there are all sorts of lab experiments where you can make equipment essentially available to universities in that way," says Abelson, adding that MIT is planning to launch an initiative that will bring in more institutional partners to conduct experiments on a variety of remote, geographically dispersed laboratories.

www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/projects/icampus/projects/ilab.html