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Three goals affected the overall design:
- Intuitive Infrastructure: The software must make it simple and inexpensive for a lab to be internet accessible---regardless of the nature of the lab itself, the pedagogy used by the faculty, or the academic policies of the educational institution using the lab.
- Scalable Architecture: The software and process must scale to support multiple online lab offerings for large groups of students semester after semester.
- Cross-institution Cooperation: The system must allow schools or universities to share the cost of an expensive. It must also accommodate such government participation as limited access to national laboratories or facilities like the International Space Station.
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