Adaptable Digital Labs - Motivation and Vision of the CrossLab Project

The flexibility and performance of digital laboratory elements such as remote labs, VR/AR or simulations summarized under the term cross-reality labs (CrossLabs), can be seen with the development in last and has been proven under the pandemic situation. Even though the potential of cross-reality labs is obvious referring to availability and flexibility for the students, these didactic solutions remain isolated at universities as well as for individual users. The implementations are mostly so rigid that the individual didactic objectives are not interchangeable between different universities and disciplines, hence there is a lack of interoperability. The CrossLab project seeks to design didactical, technical, and organizational solutions for open digital lab objects linking student-centered teaching and a cross-university learning environment. Of importance thereby is the fact that teaching is not adaptable to the digital laboratory, but the laboratories are adaptable to the requirements of the teaching-learning setting. The four project partners are working on a cross-type and cross-element mixture of diverse types of laboratories for cross-disciplinary use in a cross-universities settings. Thereby, the project leans on existing digital laboratories in various disciplines to create an open teaching and learning environment which can be adapted to the needs of students and to provide students with the skills necessary for future working scenarios.