In many disciplines of STEM education, online experiments (OEs), commonly called remote-controlled experiments, become an emerging practice in technology-enhanced learning because of their many merits perceived in educational research. We recently formulated an innovative, low-cost, and open-source approach to developing new OEs rapidly. It won a gold medal and a special prize in an international innovation and invention competition in 2018. Using this new approach, teachers and students can easily access OEs with a lightweight web browser using any hardware and any operating system without installing additional software or apps. They can observe and/or control the experiments and collect authentic data (over a very short or long time) for further analysis by plotting graphs and/or conducting calculations to obtain important results. Some well-accepted instructional approaches or pedagogies have been integrated into online science/STEM experiments, which can also be aligned with school-based curricula to provide self-contained courseware for students’ online self-regulated learning. In this chapter, we will focus on whether OEs could really and effectively provide the essential elements of experimental learning to ‘school students’ as expected in traditional laboratory work. From our pilot implementation in four Hong Kong (HK) and Mainland China (CHINA) secondary schools with a total of 172 participants, we explored the OE experiences of different experiments and cognitive performance among students from different regions and genders using the conventional mixed methods research and design-based research. Students’ feedback and suggestions for improvement of the OEs were also analysed together with some specific implications for science/STEM education. Copyright © 2022 The Author(s).

This paper proposes a novel remote-controlled laboratory (RCL) system, which was developed by using innovative ideas and methods for applying technology-enhanced learning to secondary school science education (grade 7-9 or ages 12-14) through three iterative cycles of design-based research. This Internet-based RCL system enables learners to control and observe the server side of the laboratory equipment and to perform real-time remote scientific investigations at distant places.In this study, three iterative cycle trials and refinements were performed. First, a newly developed RCL system involving four remote experiments was initially tested by 64 undergraduate students who studied science education and web technology and were enrolled in teacher training courses. Then, a refined RCL system involving eight remote experiments were then evaluated by 32 secondary school students from a local public school as a second iterative cycle (selected electricity, plants, light and sound topics). After the refined RCL system was further refined, it was again evaluated by 35 secondary school students from another local public school as a third iterative cycle. The evaluation of these three iterative cycles was performed using a mixed research method that included achievement tests (for the second and third iterative cycles only), questionnaire survey, open-ended questions and interviews specifically developed to collect data on student understanding, perception, and implementation of the use of the RCL system.The results of the achievement tests revealed that the secondary students more comprehensively understood the related science topics. In addition, the survey results indicated that the participants believed that the RCL system and methods for conducting the experiments were appropriate and educational. Nevertheless, negative comments and suggestions for improvement were identified. Accordingly, the researcher refined the RCL system and its design principles (integration with