Abstract
Presented in this chapter is an Internet Natural Science Remote e-Laboratory (INRe-L), which offers remote interactive experiments and contributes to a remote laboratories cluster within the EU. The cluster was established as a common undertaking of three universities - Charles University and Tomas Bata University in the Czech Republic, and Trnava University in Slovakia.
At the present stage of development, the e-Laboratory includes experiments from physics, chemistry and environment monitoring, with 13 free access experiments available constantly. The laboratory uses the unified approach, as the hardware is the ISES (Internet School Experimental System) and its modules (see www.ises.info), and the software for the server-client connection is based on Internet web services with a common browser and Java applets.
The unique quality of the system is its simplicity both in use and in compilation (using the copy and paste approach of the pre-built building blocks), enabling the easy use of experiments by any interested party and, on top of this, easy construction of new experiments by using ISES hardware and ISES CONTROL KIT software. The experiments may be found both on http://www.ises.info and http://kf.truni.sk/remotelab.
The laboratory has been extensively used for teaching purposes using Integrated e-Learning (INTe-L) - a new strategy of education based on e-experimentation.