Abstract:

Laboratory work plays a very important role in the education of telecommunications engineers. It develops students' technical thinking, ability to transfer knowledge learned in lectures to solve practical problems in the field of telecommunications.

Laboratory work is time consuming for teachers. Sometimes teachers spend much more time to explain laboratory setup than to discuss the results from experiments. On the other hand students’ lack of knowledge on appropriate handling of laboratory equipment can lead to the failure of the experiment.

This paper presents our experiment in using QR codes in the telecommunication laboratory at Plovdiv University “Paisii Hilendarski”. The integration of QR codes in the laboratory work aims to: reduce time of explanations, reduce the wrong handling of the laboratory equipment, increase the efficiency of students' laboratory work. With QR codes placed next to the apparatuses or educational training kits, students access short instructional videos which provide:
• information regarding the operating procedure of the laboratory equipment;
• basic theory;
• step by step instructions to conduct the experiment.

Observations, reflective analysis of the learning process and questionnaires are used for data collection. The results are very satisfactory: by using QR codes students finish their laboratory tasks more quickly and correctly, they highly evaluate the developed video resources and support the use of QR codes in the classroom.

Keywords:

Mobile technology, QR Codes, telecommunications.