Enhancing education in electronic sciences using virtual laboratories developed with effective practices (original) (raw)
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E-learning is currently a rapidly growing trend which attempts to provide an infrastructural configuration that integrates and encompass learning content, services and tools as a single solution which can generate and deliver educational contents and training effectively, efficiently and cost-effectively. In advanced technical education, laboratories are essential learning spaces. Providing laboratory facilities at universities with limited funds and technical know-how is difficult due to the high expenses of installation and upkeep. In order to tackle these obstacles, "virtual laboratories" have been established. Through remote access, virtual laboratories make it possible for users to conduct experiments similar to genuine systems. Consequently, resources of laboratories can be shared across a wide community of geographically dispersed customers while restricting operational expenses and initial set-up to one single institution. This article reviews the virtual laborator...
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Within education, concepts such as distance learning, and open universities, are now becoming more widely used for teaching and learning. However, due to the nature of the subject domain, the teaching of Science, Technology, and Engineering are still relatively behind when using new technological approaches (particularly for online distance learning). The reason for this discrepancy lies in the fact that these fields often require laboratory exercises to provide effective skill acquisition and hands-on experience. Often it is difficult to make these laboratories accessible for online access. Either the real lab needs to be enabled for remote access or it needs to be replicated as a fully software-based virtual lab. We argue for the latter concept since it offers some advantages over remotely controlled real labs, which will be elaborated further in this paper. We are now seeing new emerging technologies that can overcome some of the potential difficulties in this area. These include: computer graphics, augmented reality, computational dynamics, and virtual worlds. This paper summarizes the state of the art in virtual laboratories and virtual worlds in the fields of science, technology, and engineering. The main research activity in these fields is discussed but special emphasis is put on the field of robotics due to the maturity of this area within the virtual-education community. This is not a coincidence; starting from its widely multidisciplinary character, robotics is a perfect example where all the other fields of engineering and physics can contribute. Thus, the use of virtual labs for other scientific and non-robotic engineering uses can be seen to share many of the same learning processes. This can include supporting the introduction of new concepts as part of learning about science and technology, and introducing more general engineering knowledge, through to supporting more constructive (and collaborative) education and training activities in a more complex engineering topic such as robotics. The objective of this paper is to outline this problem space in more detail and to create a valuable source of information that can help to define the starting position for future research. 1 A more widely known acronym is STEM and it includes Mathematics. However, we do not consider Mathematics and hence will use the abbreviation STE. learning, virtual laboratories, virtual reality and virtual worlds, avatars, dynamics-based virtual systems, and the overall new concept of immersive education that integrates many of these ideas together. Many highly reputable institutions 2 have gathered around this challenging concept, within organizations such as the Immersive Education Initiative [1] and the Immersive Learning Research Network iLRN [2]. The mentioned topics and the corresponding technologies can open the way to advanced education in STE disciplines. The concept of immersive education has been applied to all aspects of education, including: formal-institutional education, informal massive education, and professional training in companies. Previously, Internet-based distance education appeared as the first response to challenges resulting from the trend of increased globalization of education (which we now describe as a global competence 3). This trend meant removing all obstacles that limited the access to education, thus making education available to everybody regardless of place, personal disabilities, social status, etc. There have already been significant developments in this direction, with the creation of fully Internet-based universities [3, 4]. However, STE sciences are still far behind in this respect [5], although there have been some notable successes which are worth mentioning such as the development of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) by MIT. MOOCs provide web-based interactive user forums that help build a community for students, professors, and teaching assistants. The increased demand for distance education in technology and engineering subjects has led to new courses being offered using both formal-institutional and informal-massive-online education approaches. Institutions and distance-learning providers are looking to expand the number of online courses that they can offer within the STE disciplines. Less institutional but still considered formal is the provision of professional training in companies. This can include both training that a company provides for its staff, as well as the training that is organized for the staff of customer companies. In these cases virtual laboratories are an economic solution at least for initial and middle-level training. The other aspect is the emergence of the so-called Maker Movement [6, 7, 8] where groups of interested people can gather around ad-hoc community projects. A key aspect of this is the need to find qualified participants that can cover all the different problems in the project, regardless of the place where they live. This informal approach to innovation, development, and even manufacturing, requires the use of new approaches and tools to support collaboration, and the online 'co-creation' of new products and technologies. This includes the use of new platforms than can support virtual laboratories and online experiments.
Educational practice in virtual laboratories for engineering studies
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In this article new ways to approach the educative process are presented, they are shown from a point of view of the education methodology, as the virtual laboratories. A study of the necessity to incorporate in the education of engineering degrees, virtual laboratories. In addition, the advantages that these laboratories offer are analyzed and the disadvantages that the students have when they use them and other new technologies which are involved in the use of this means of education. The study and analysis that appear here have been made with computer science engineering and technical engineering students. This studies have a technical-scientific character and are intimately linked to the use of new technologies and virtual laboratories.
: 15th International Scientific Conference on eLearning and So, 2019
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During last years the interest on distance learning techniques has grown steadily as far as the use of electronic instruments in experimentation is concerned. Due to the higher and higher number of students accessing the university educational structures, the cost of laboratories for didactical electronic applications is going to be very high. As a consequence, a number of software tools and environments have been developed to help users to share distributed laboratory resources and realize virtual experiments. Nevertheless, further solutions have to be explored when students must be trained and experienced in the instrumentation programming. In this paper, we exploit modern software technologies to design and implement a distributed architecture for virtual labs allowing the approach previously described. Services integrated in this architecture aim to support students both to keep contact with real instruments both to remotely program instrumentation. This distance learning methodology is discussed and some reports from students experience with the system are showed
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