Abstract:

Last year’s lockdowns, resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, caught everyone off guard. No contingency measures were prepared. For education, the solution was to implement remote learning. The primary requirement for this approach is an abundance of digital resources. Doing lectures this way was already widely tested but for the exercise portion of the curriculum the lecturers had to think outside the box, so they can prepare entirely new tasks that simulate the normal hands-on experience with measuring equipment. In the discipline “Mobile cellular networks” students learn about different effects in these networks, not only the components that they consist of. With preparing digital resources to learn, lecturers decide to use software for the exercises. One major problem in mobile cellular networks is the shadowing effect. This effect cannot be avoided, but need to be investigated and possibly reduced. To investigate this process students need to perform a number of simulations in Matlab that will provide an idea of the magnitude of the shadowing attenuation caused by obstacles in the radio path.
This paper presents the tasks that students need to perform when learning about shadowing effects in mobile cellular networks and the active learning methods that are used in the classes.

The learning process is complemented by the introduction of active learning methods to increase the levels of the students’ engagement and to ensure long-term knowledge retention. Applying active learning methods also allows the teacher to gauge everyone’s level of understanding, receive valuable feedback, and focus on the parts of the topic that may require additional explanation, clarification, or more practice exercises.

Keywords:

Mobile cellular networks, shadowing effect, active and interactive methods.