Assessing the quality of web-enabled laboratories in undergraduate education

A web-enabled laboratory provides remote access to state of the art equipment. The use of web-enabled laboratories in undergraduate education has dramatically increased over the past six years, but no criteria have been established to assess the quality of this new teaching tool. We identify ten vital components any successful web-enabled laboratory should possess. We design assessment criteria and use them to evaluate one hundred randomly chosen web-enabled laboratories presently in use in the United States and elsewhere. The results of the assessment are analyzed as well.