Abstract:

A greater number of Engineering graduates is fundamental for the economic growth in developing countries, but also in those countries, E-Learning may be the only viable means of scaling the number of engineering students, and reaching all the desired audiences.

There are many E-learning based courses in Higher Education, but in the Engineering domain they are usually
focused on post-graduation degrees. On those courses, the practical works can be done using simulation tools and models, while in undergraduate degrees, for pedagogical reasons the practical works should be done with real equipment.

Remote Laboratories are the solution to the problem of giving E-Learning students access to practical experiments and equipment, without physically distributing all the required equipment by all the participating students. But, in order to develop effective courses, the diverse theories related to learning, cognition, teaching and instructional design need to be analyzed considering that they will be applied to Engineering courses, that will work online (in E-Learning) and using Remote Labs.

The e-Lives Project is an Erasmus+ project, coordinated by the University of Limoges that aims to identify the best practices in e-Engineering, the development of reliable remote laboratory solutions, the development of practical open staff training, the assessment of the pedagogical innovation solutions used, and the promotion of the concept of e-Engineering within the South and Eastern Mediterranean countries.

In the development of this project, and considering the previous experience of the project partners in the EOLES project, a program in Electronics and Optics e-Learning for Embedded Systems, an "e-Learning 2.0" English-taught 3rd year Bachelor degree course, several pedagogical approaches and theories were considered.

They range from different Learning Theories, Instructional Design theories, Learning Taxonomies, Problem and Project based Learning, and they all can be applied to E-Learning Engineering Degrees, with some adaptations, and always considering the desired outcomes. This paper will review the different pedagogical methods that should be applied in the development of e-Engineering courses, according to the analyses done by the e-LIVES partners.

Keywords:

e-learning, Engineering, Higher Education, Pedagogy.