Remote labs let students remotely control real physical laboratory equipment at a university. Reported benefits include accessibility, lower costs, opportunities to collaborate with peers abroad, a greater sense of student autonomy, and the ability for a teacher to supervise several groups at once. Research on learning outcomes finds that students learn well from essentially any type of lab, with motivational and social factors strongly shaping results; remote labs appear about as effective as hands-on labs even though students tend to rate them as less effective. Advocates of in-person labs emphasize the value of learning to reconcile and explain differences between expected and experimental results, while advocates of remote labs emphasize that easy repeatability can foster deeper learning.