Abstract:

The Industrial Revolution 4.0 with its technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, and the Internet of Things is changing the world. It will not only affect the major industries but the roles for which students will be prepared, resulting in the evolution of education.

The Industrial Revolution 4.0 will require “educational institutions to produce a workforce for working in this technologically transformed era and the current workforce to upgrade their skills and knowledge to match these newly created job roles” making the revolution in education essential.
The future of education, Education 4.0, will change the teaching-learning methodologies to prepare the students for the future progressive, intellectual and knowledge-driven world.

A few trends in this evolution are:
1) accelerate remote learning;
2) personalized learning;
3) choice of education tools;
4) project-based learning;
5) field-specific experience;
6) data analysis;
7) changes in exam pattern and assessment.

One of these trends is Project-Based Learning (PBL), defined as “a teaching method in which students gain knowledge and skills by working for an extended period of time to investigate and respond to an authentic, engaging, and complex question, problem, or challenge”.

The purpose of the course “Coding in Telecommunication Systems”, included as an elective course in the curriculum of the specialty “Internet and Mobile Communications”, educational qualification degree “Bachelor”, is to acquaint students with the models of data transmission systems, statistical methods for quantitative measurement of information, methods for optimal coding of information and basics of the theory of error control coding. The lecture material focuses on the theory and applications of error control coding. The practical exercises complement and expand students’ knowledge through computer simulation and work with FPGA-based laboratory boards.

Due to the small number of course classes (20 lectures and 20 exercises), the “flipped classroom” approach is often used in teaching students, where students must first get acquainted with the theory of channel codes at home, using the references recommended by the teacher, and then during the classes, they can debate on the material and work on an individual assignment. According to the curriculum, some of the exercises are intended for solving problems with mathematical orientation, performing information coding and decoding. Unfortunately, students fail to become familiar with the hardware implementation of encoder and decoder circuits. For this reason, the following experiment was conducted this academic year in the conditions of Covid-19.

The students were divided into teams (groups of 3-4 students each), and they had to work on a project on the topic of Hamming Codes, whose hardware implementation is not very complicated and using their knowledge from the course “Pulse and Digital Devices”, as well as the study of additional materials, they could come up with exemplary block diagrams of encoders and decoders to investigate them by simulation in some software product, such as Logisim.
The paper presents the application of project-based learning on the topic “Encoders and Decoders of (15,11) Hamming Codes” implemented with different computer-based tools, for making the course more attractive and more effective in the final students’ assessment and allowing the lecturer to adapt the course to the learning environment Education 4.0.

Keywords:

Education 4.0, project-based learning, Hamming codes, encoders, decoders.