Abstract:

Higher Education is given on-line since COVID-19 appeared and disseminated all over the world. Both students and teachers had little time to adapt to new learning-teaching applications and tools such as TEAMS or ZOOM. Subsequently, learning methodologies were also redesigned to be effective in a “non-presential” scenario that is mainly aseptic and depersonalized.

When the state of emergency and confinement were over, the University had to reinvent educational methodologies. Then, new educational terms and expressions appeared in Higher Education and particularly in Engineering careers. Terms such as “partial attendance”, “synchronous and asynchronous sessions” are nowadays present in our course guidelines but also in an unstable scenario in which higher education strategies are changing by the day.

In this scenario, theory lessons have been easy to adapt to on-line education. In the same way, tutorials have become more fluid and flexible with this new system. On the other hand, difficulties to achieve an objective evaluation and conducting useful practice sessions are some of the identified weaknesses of the system.

This paper focuses on these aspects studying the development of practices by local or on-line simulators and even by remote laboratories. A specific practice prototype is introduced, allowing “partial attendance” of the students, a part of them in-situ in the laboratory and another part attending the practice on-line by remote access to the practice board. This proposal lets us develop real practices with no need of synchronous assistance from the teachers by using a remote system and monitoring its development by webcam.

Keywords:

Higher education, Engineering, On-line practices, RemoteLab.