Remote administration and user experience evaluation of the iLab Heat Transfer Project site

Abstract

The iLab Heat Transfer Project provides a means for students to remotely execute, via a web interface, experiments related to the topic of heat transfer. The website associated with this project provides instructors with the ability to remotely manage the performance of experiments by their students. This thesis describes improvements made to this website that are intended to grant more control to instructors. Specifically, the website has been augmented to provide remote instructors with complete control over experiment scheduling, user registration, document uploading, and other relevant administrative tasks. The interfaces by which users perform experiments have been modified to incorporate an audio and video feed of the laboratory equipment used in these experiments. In addition, the website has been extended with a feature that facilitates the viewing and analysis of questionnaire responses collected from students. The questionnaire responses provided by students have been examined to gain more knowledge about the effectiveness of various aspects of the website and experiment interfaces.