The iLab Shared Architecture: A Web Services Infrastructure to Build Communities of Internet Accessible Laboratories

TLDR

The project assumes that faculty teaching online labs and those providing them have distinct roles, goals, and concerns. MIT’s iLab project aims to develop a distributed software toolkit and middleware infrastructure that enables Internet‑accessible laboratories and encourages their sharing among schools and universities worldwide. Its architecture supports rapid, platform‑independent lab development, scalable student access, efficient provider management, and preserves the autonomy of teaching faculty. Over two years, the architecture has been adopted by universities across Europe, Australia, Africa, Asia, and the United States, demonstrating that online laboratory use can scale to thousands of students on multiple continents.

Abstract

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's iLab project has developed a distributed software toolkit and middleware service infrastructure to support Internet-accessible laboratories and promote their sharing among schools and universities on a worldwide scale. The project starts with the assumption that the faculty teaching with online labs and the faculty or academic departments that provide those labs are acting in two roles with different goals and concerns. The iLab architecture focuses on fast platform-independent lab development, scalable access for students, and efficient management for lab providers while preserving the autonomy of the faculty actually teaching the students. Over the past two years, the iLab architecture has been adopted by an increasing number of partner universities in Europe, Australia, Africa, Asia, and the United States. The iLab project has demonstrated that online laboratory use can scale to thousands of students dispersed on several continents.