Enhancing virtual and remote labs to perform automatic evaluation

Virtual and remote laboratories are increasingly popular as learning tools in engineering education. The laboratories can help students to understand practical and theoretical concepts in a more human-readable way. It's common to ask students a report done by following a set of activities to be performed with the laboratories. Instructors can assess each student according to the report. However, the process of evaluation could require a great effort. This could be even worse if the correct answers are not unique, such as the PID parameters that stabilize a system. Here's where automatic evaluation comes in handy. Automatic evaluation can reduce the effort needed to assess student's report. This article describes an approach to add automatic evaluation to virtual and remote laboratories by using the server application Goodle, which actually performs the evaluation, and the Java package AEE, which adds this feature to the laboratories built with the authoring tool Easy Java Simulations.