Abstract:

European universities want to ensure high quality training, in order to comply with guidelines of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) in their Degree titles. One of innovations designed to improve both teaching and learning is to apply information and communication technologies (ICT’s) to provide an open teaching, more flexible and interactive in order to encourage the student to manage his own learning. Currently, Spanish universities are promoting the blended learning (b-learning) methodology. The b-learning is based on the use of the classroom (lectures) and distance technological resources (virtual teaching platforms and virtual and remote laboratories) to optimize the results of academic training.
In the degrees in engineering, the experience that provides laboratory practices is essential, since they link the theoretical and practical contents and promote active learning. In particular, with regard to electronic engineering students, the practical exercises with electronic instrumentation in laboratories have shown a very positive contribution to the acquisition of skills. If the use of ICTs and experimentation in the lab is combined, a new type of labs appears: virtual and remote labs.

The purpose of this work is to provide educational tools based on ICT’s in order to encourage the active learning by students in the subjects related to Data Acquisition Systems of the degree in Industrial Electronic Engineering of the University of Jaén. Actually, the current trend in Technical Schools is to promote a greater use of ICTs as a learning support in the development of practical experiments for students over the Internet. This gives students not only access to the lab from anywhere at any time, thus reducing costs substantially, but provide the students the necessary skills to 'define' their own learning style.

In this sense, the present work is aimed at designing and implementing different virtual instruments (VI) programmed with LabVIEW to control remotely the electronic instrumentation equipment of a real Electronics Instrumentation Laboratory (Power supply, Function generator, multimeter, oscilloscope and Data Logger). These VI’s will be used in the subject Data Acquisition Systems of the Degree in Industrial Electronic Engineering. Moreover, the development of these VI will provide a proper interface for the implementation of a remote laboratory. The latter not only can facilitate, in a remote way, the practical activities related to data acquisition systems, furthermore, it may be used in any subject related with a basic electronic bench.

Keywords:

Virtual lab, labview, b-learning.