Testing theories through practice is an important approach to teaching, especially for scientific and technical curricula. Lack of resources and logistic problems often make practice impossible. During the last few years, several attempts to find an alternative to in-laboratory experiments have been made by many researchers. In this paper, we present our approach to the challenge of remote laboratories. We outline the model we have created and the prototype we have implemented and validated. Finally, we propose a grid-oriented view of the remote laboratory that could help to support experimental activity in e-learning efforts in a scattered community of users.