Web-Lab: Enhancing the Undergraduate Engineering Experience

Web-Lab is an innovative SBE program that web enables laboratory experiments. A collection of bioreactors are located miles away in a central facility, and students, regardless of their physical location, can access and remotely interact with the bioreactor in real time over the internet. Multiple schools can access these web-based experiments and incorporate them into their curriculum, either as a lab or to supplement a lecture course. This is the objective of the SBE Web-Lab Initiative—to advance engineering education by breaking beyond the confines of the classroom and enhancing the typical classroom experience.

The upside of the web-based laboratories is to reduce the cost incurred per student to deliver state-of-the-art laboratory exercises and thereby enable more students to participate in a modern laboratory experience. Web-based laboratories will improve undergraduates’ education by better preparing engineers with the latest skills and tools to compete in the global workforce.