Portuguese Universities Sharing Remote Laboratories

This paper describes a pedagogical assignment based on a cooperative work involving teachers/students from two Portuguese universities. As it happens one is the oldest in the country – University of Coimbra (UC) - and the other the largest - University of Porto (UP), about 120 km apart. The authors, believing in the relevance of Information and Communication Technologies (ITs) in teaching/learning methodologies and in cooperative teaching methods worked together to plan this pedagogical experience and to run it in a one semester course. Students from UC have been introduced to the remote lab at UP and got the first contact with the remote experiments using easily available sound and image resources based on Skype and an IP camera for better image quality. This first contact has been conducted by the first author at UP with support of the second author at UC. The work will describe briefly the remote experiments used, their inclusion in the course at UC, the associated assessment criteria and, finally, student comments.