Abstract:

The engineering educational program at KU Leuven, Bruges Campus, Belgium, contains both a general scientific and a technical formation including laboratory courses. Among these laboratory courses is a laboratory course on analogue and digital electronics. Since the last years, the teaching staff faces an increasing number of students in combination with a decreasing number of staff members for guiding these laboratory sessions. This evolution created challenges in providing the same amount of laboratory exercises while maintaining both the desired learning outcomes as well as the quality. To address these challenges, a new laboratory organization including an appropriate assessment methodology has been introduced and tested. The measures taken and presented in this paper embrace different aspects, but with a focus on teacher-independent laboratory implementation. Laboratory instruction videos have been made to guide the students on how to use specific laboratory equipment. To optimize the use of student-staff interaction time during the laboratory sessions, a decent preparation by the students is mandatory. This is stimulated by providing instruction videos, information, guidelines, preparatory questions and a discussion forum hosted on a Learning Management System (LMS). During the actual experiments, the students measure physical quantities on a Printed Circuit Board (PCB) to track down the behavior of electronic circuits and components. Students are introduced and directed to the use of an electronic laboratory notebook. In this notebook they write down all measurements, phenomena, behavior descriptions and conclusions at the moment they encounter them. With the help of their notebook, students perform an automated assessment immediately at the end of the laboratory session. This open-notebook assessments consist of quizzes with questions on both measurement data and insights in the measured phenomena and behavior. The quizzes are organized on the LMS, hence randomization and automatic evaluation is performed. The automatic evaluation allows for a sufficiently fast and decent feedback to the students, giving them the opportunity to adjust their study behavior. At the same time it also significantly decreases the assessment workload for the teaching staff compared to the traditionally used methodologies with post-lab reports. This paper further discusses the evaluation of the newly used methodology by analyzing the students’ results and evolution, by comparing the students’ results with the traditional methods and by surveying the students. The results of the evaluation indicate very feasible student results and distributions, while showing a large satisfaction concerning the proposed methodology among students and teaching staff.

Keywords:

Laboratory experiment automation, laboratory preparation, educational videos, electronic notebook, electronic assessment, Learning Management System.