The effect of remote and virtual laboratories on students' academic achievement and practice skills

Due to various emergency circumstances, such as natural disasters, the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, and wars, face-to-face learning stopped, and educational institutions' programs shifted to distance learning to ensure the continuation of study. One of the challenges facing academic institutions is the difficulty of teaching laboratory courses remotely and the risks of teaching laboratory courses remotely hurting student achievement. This study aims to design and implement a web-based system for a remote laboratory using the Anvil framework and a server-client architecture, to cover laboratory experiments for embedded systems at the College of Electronic Technologies in Tripoli, Libya, and to study the possibility of the remote laboratory and the virtual laboratory being alternative and effective solutions for the traditional laboratory when the face-to-face study stops. The experimental study was conducted using a posttest only control group research design, where embedded systems students were randomly separated into three groups. The first group conducted seven experiments remotely using the remote laboratory. In contrast, the second group performed the same experiments using the virtual laboratory (Tinkercad system), and the control group conducted the same experiments in the college laboratory. The student's academic performance was evaluated using a combination of summative and formative assessments approaches, also, student's problem-solving and creative thinking skills was evaluated using Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education (VALUE) rubrics approach. Data was statistically analyzed using Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) test, the results indicated no statistically significant differences between the three methods regarding their impact on their academic achievement, problem-solving, and creative thinking skills. The research results proved the validity of the research hypotheses, which can be summarized as follows: When distance learning stops, the use of both the remote laboratory and the virtual laboratory is an alternative and successful solution.