Access and personalized instruction required for laboratory education can be highly compromised due to regulatory constraints in times such as COVID-19 pandemic or resource shortages at other times. This directly impacts the student engagement and immersion that are necessary for conceptual and procedural understanding for scientific experimentation. While online and remote laboratories have potential to address the aforementioned challenges, theoretical perspectives of laboratory learning outcomes are critical to enhance their impact and are sparsely examined in the literature. Using Transactional Distance Theory (TDT), this paper addresses the gap through a case study on Universal Testing Machine (UTM). By comparing physical (PL-UTM) and remotely triggerable (RT-UTM) laboratory platforms, the structure and interactions as per TDT are analysed. Characterization of interactivity between remote learners and instructors disclose indicative parameters that affect transactional distances and aid in conceptual understanding in remote laboratory learning environment. An extensive pedagogical study through development of two instruments towards assessing conceptual understanding and perception of platform effectiveness that was conducted both on physical laboratory and RT-UTM showed: (1) remote users conducted experiments 3 times more frequently (2) completed assignments in 30% less time and (3) had over 200% improvement in scores when RT-UTM platform was integrated into mainstream learning.

由于在 COVID-19 大流行或其他时间资源短缺等时期的监管限制，实验室教育所需的访问和个性化指导可能会受到很大影响。这直接影响学生的参与度和沉浸感，这是科学实验的概念和程序理解所必需的。虽然在线和远程实验室有潜力解决上述挑战，但实验室学习成果的理论观点对于增强其影响至关重要，并且在文献中很少被审查。本文使用事务距离理论 (TDT)，通过万能试验机 (UTM) 的案例研究解决了这一差距。通过比较物理 (PL-UTM) 和可远程触发 (RT-UTM) 实验室平台，分析了 TDT 的结构和相互作用。远程学习者和教师之间的交互性特征揭示了影响交易距离的指示性参数，并有助于远程实验室学习环境中的概念理解。在物理实验室和 RT-UTM 上通过开发两种工具来评估概念理解和平台有效性感知的广泛教学研究表明：(1) 远程用户进行实验的频率提高了 3 倍 (2) 30% 完成了作业时间更短，（3）当 RT-UTM 平台集成到主流学习中时，分数提高了 200% 以上。