Abstract:

Online learning is very attractive to students due to its time flexibility and individual learning pace. These benefits are valuable to students in electrical engineering degree program with laboratory courses. In order to help students better manage their time and learn in their own pace with lab work, the authors have undertaken an investigation of different technologies to allow students to better prepare for their labs and to work on the labs either online or onsite, using virtual or real circuit hardware.

In this paper, the authors will present a hybrid learning model of performing electrical engineering labs by students via several different methodologies:
• Online demo labs,
• Onsite hands-on labs,
• At home, online labs controlling physical hardware located in the labs

Feedback from student surveys showed that one of the most time consuming parts of working on a new lab experiment is gaining the understanding of what the lab is about and how to proceed with the step-by-step procedures for doing the lab. We believe that this format for an online demo lab is particularly helpful to the freshmen electrical engineering students or for labs with complicate procedures.

For this introductory or demo phase of the project we have created an online demo lab consists of three parts:
• A video recording of the lab experiment procedures,
• A remote measurement of selected data,
• A downloadable video recording of data manipulation and practice circuit solutions.
Once the student has viewed the demo, and worked with remote data set, they can also perform virtual measurements using Labview™ software from National Instruments, Inc.

The onsite hands-on labs are the traditional labs that students perform using standard bench measurement instruments. However the student can more effectively use their time since they have gained sufficient understanding of the lab deliverables.

The last part of our system allows students to perform experiments completely remotely at home. This is an added value to student learning because they can practice, analyze and discover the lab in their own pace. The remote system consists of a motherboard which controls a series of pc-based instruments whose inputs and outputs can be configured to different pins on a series of connectors. The connectors mate to daughter boards; each daughter board contains a specific experiment.

Students located off-site perform a remote login to the lab PC controlling the system. The application running on the PC displays the schematic diagram of the circuit. The student can then connect circuit nodes to the measurement equipment, as well as vary resistor, capacitor and inductor values and follow the circuit behavior. All component switching is handled through analog matrix switching.

These online, on-site and take-home labs provide students many benefits such as lessening a beginner learning fear, efficiency usage of time, flexibility of learning environment and practice of real world industrial equipment.

In addition, the authors intend to share the standalone system with plug-in lab modules through an open source concept. A full set of design documentation will provide a collaboration platform for universities to share and contribute lab modules and to promote innovations and international synergy.

Keywords:

Individual learning, virtual environment, remote lab, online lab.