Abstract:

Students from electrical engineering specialties need to learn essential skills like critical, logical, and analytical thinking, problem-solving, working with special equipment, etc. For this purpose, in the course “Radio Communication Technologies” students practice their knowledge and skills in practical exercises using real equipment. The pandemic situation over the last two years has forced teachers to change how they present the discipline to the students, including how students can practice their skills. The solution for the practical classes is to use software so students can simulate real conditions and networks. This will give them the opportunity to continue to acquire the necessary knowledge, skills, and competencies even when they have to learn from home. In traditional learning, students can touch the devices and learn with real equipment, but in online learning, this is not possible. Therefore, the solution is to use specialized software products, which are accurate and reliable. National Instruments (NI) Multisim is a software used for designing analog and digital circuits in education and research. For all simulations conducted in the classes, students first need to draw the circuit in NI Multisim, then set the parameters of the equipment, start the simulation, search for the results using measurements and/or calculations, and in the end analyze them. The difference, in comparison to the use of real equipment in the lab, is that students will connect the equipment first, not draw the circuits, and will not start the simulation, but will turn on the devices used.

During online classes, students can get knowledge from different resources, videos, libraries, etc. They use different tools and even can discuss ideas, thoughts, and suggestions with others. The paper presents active and interactive methods used during the online learning in the course “Radio Communication Technologies” and the tasks that students need to perform when learning the topic “Spectral Analysis of Signal Harmonics”.

Keywords:

Online learning, signal harmonics, NI Multisim, radio communications.