Using an Online Remote Laboratory for Electrical Experiments in Upper Secondary Education

The learning of technical and science disciplines requires experimental and practical training. Hands-on labs are the natural scenarios where practical skills can be developed but, thanks to Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), virtual and remote labs can provide a framework where Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines can also be developed. One of these remote labs is the Virtual Instruments System in Reality (VISIR), specially designed to practice in the area of analog electronics. This paper aims at describing how this remote lab is being used in the Universidad Nacional de la Patagonia San Juan Bosco (UNPSJB - Argentina), in the framework of the VISIR+ (“This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein”.) project funded by the Erasmus+ Program, one institution without previous experiences with remote labs.

Today's educational needs require tools with neither geographical nor temporal restrictions. These tools also have to help students to reach the knowledge and provide them with the skills that the labor market demands. To achieve this goal, the technical areas rely on the contribution that laboratory practices provide. However, traditional laboratory practices, carried out in person at the institution, are limited due to the requirements of both their exploitation and their provision. For this reason, educational institutions have opted for remote laboratories (RLs) as the educational tool to provide the benefits of experimentation in real environments, either as an accompaniment to face-to-face activity or as the only mean of experimentation in real environments. Although RLs provide exclusive benefits <<24/7 availability, integration of Information and Communication Technologies (ITCs), etc.>>, they also present limitations derived from the technology involved <<hardware and software>>; PILAR project << Platform Integration of Laboratories based on the Architecture of VISIR>> was conceived under this premise. PILAR proposes a federation of 5 Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality (VISIR) systems. VISIR is a RL for wiring and measuring electrical and electronics circuits in a simulated workbench. PILAR aims to create a grid of laboratories shared and accessed by all participants, expanding and empowering the existing systems to a new level of service and capacity.

A remote laboratory is a real laboratory which is controlled and monitored remotely. The promotion of online experimentation is strengthening due to social needs and students/user demands based on accessible educational resources without temporal or geographical restrictions through the Internet. This educational approach also promotes lifelong learning and support education. The VISIR (Virtual Instrument Systems In Reality) remote laboratory is intended for the experimentation, signal measuring and design of electrical/electronics circuits remotely. The PILAR (Platform Integration of Laboratories based on the Architecture of visiR) Erasmus Plus project aims for the federation of five of the existing VISIR nodes, for sharing analog electronics experiments and empowering capacity and resources of each partner, as well as providing access to other educational institutions to a VISIR remote lab through the PILAR consortium.

This innovative practice full paper is displaying research results on implementing a ready-to-use remote lab in the area of electronics called Virtual Instrument Systems In Reality (VISIR) in several electrical engineering classes at the University of Georgia (UGA) over three consecutive terms. The displayed research data has been generated during the spring, summer, and fall terms in 2019. This paper discusses existing research contexts and results concerning VISIR in general and the VISIR integration at UGA in particular. Furthermore, the students’ feedback and educational research results from the focused three semesters will be displayed. It is evident, that the use of remote labs does exclude segments of reality and context during the experimental procedure. The question is instead, if and to what extent this is beneficial for the learning experience, e.g. by looking at collaboration and learning outcomes.

During experiments with electric circuits, students often make mistakes. To handle these situations, remote laboratories such as VISIR (Virtual Instruments Systems in Reality) rely on error-handling mechanisms, which do not always cover all errors. This article seeks to extend a previously published work when trying to assimilate all possible errors in alternated current circuits with a single power supply and a single passive component. The goal is to build an errors’ map with all possible errors, covering all circuits that can be assembled in VISIR, from the simplest to the most complex. This allows limiting misconceptions during theoretical and practical understanding are limited.

Lab work and exercises are an essential part of Electronic Engineering Education as it improves understanding of the theoretical concepts. Remote Labs like VISIR (Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality) can supplement the learning process but are limited to a small set of components. Therefore, experiments with VISIR should be combined with prepared and fixed circuits.<br />This work presents an approach, where in the first step new exercises are de-veloped with the NI ELVIS platform, and later implemented with the much more cost-effective NI myDAQ platform. In general, the entire system is very inexpen-sive and scaleable, since a single PC can act as a host for a wide number of exer-cise boards, each of which is connected via a myDAQ.

Fundamentals of electronic circuits' practices have a central role in all the electrical engineering education disciplines. They teach the student the basics of electronic circuit's components and the adjustment of electrical instruments, and allow him to wire and build circuits in order to realize and monitor measurements. Unfortunately, and despite the importance of this type of practices, they are not usually available at many universities owing to geographical, cost, and time constraints. With the evolving of communication and computer technologies, and the advent of E-Learning, it was possible to vanish these constrains by the powerful tools provided by E-Learning, among them the remote laboratories. Thus, recently, many universities have shifted from traditional hands-on laboratories to remote laboratories in order to tackle these constrains bringing fundamentals of electronic circuits practices on-line to students. This has allowed students to access the lab at any time and from anywhere and to design, wire and measure electronic circuits remotely, achieving a significant increase in the lab availability and cost reduction. This paper reports on the current trends in remote laboratories for fundamentals of electronic circuits practices, pointing out significant projects such as Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality (VISIR), NetLab, and remote labs based on NI ELVIS II, which have been successfully adopted at many universities and deployed in the electrical engineering curricula. The paper, also, addresses other common independent approaches based on Data Acquisition Systems (DASs) in combination with measurement and control environments, such as LabVIEW and MATLAB.

Analysis and design are important phases in the system development lifecycle. In these phases, developers record information necessary for properly understanding the nature of the systems under consideration.We consider a particular type of system, named Remote Lab that allows both teachers and students to perform real experiments over the internet and we focus on Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality (VISIR). We describe a summarized web interface of VISIR using the Unified Modeling Language (UML). Our case study aims at identifying the requirements of VISIR and at creating a set of UML diagrams that succinctly provide enough information to both developers and users so that they acquire enough information for building a general understanding of it. Additionally, we provide elements for extending UML to better support further user interface development in VISIR.

It is obvious that our society needs more engineers. It is also true that mankind must live in symbiosis with nature and focus on sustainability and understanding. Thus, engineers must be able to design products and services which are in line with the principles of nature and the only way to become familiar with these principles is to perform many physical experiments. A way to use instructional laboratories more effectively and offer more hours in the laboratories for students without significant increased cost per student is opening them for remote access. Hands-on experiments are indispensable but remote mouse-cursor-on ones can supplement them. The VISIR (Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality) Open Laboratory Platform offers an open standard for online workbenches enabling students not only to perform physical experiments 24/7 but also to practice laboratory work. Learning objectives of laboratory work, free access to laboratory resources, and individual assessment of such work should be important key elements in an education delivering engineers with a solid documented laboratory experience.

Several researchers report that practical experimentation arouses a strong interest among students in Chemistry learning. Also, the classes held in didactic laboratories enhance the learning ability of the students, because they help the understanding of the subject matter. There are also reports stating that students feel more motivated to learn Chemistry when they make use of practical and dynamic classes. However, the availability of laboratories to carry out practical activities is difficult to found in different levels of education in several countries. This paper assumes that the expansion of resources to increase the experimental practice of Chemistry can be achieved by developing virtual laboratories in a way of helping them to get involved in active learning. In this work a virtual laboratory, called VirtuaLabQ, with predefined experiments about Chemical Transformations is introduced. Also, a case study that shows the use of VirtuaLabQ integrated to hands-on laboratory is presented. The case study was performed with Engineering undergraduate students that attend the Chemical Transformation course. The main target of this study was to investigate if practicing the experiments previously in VirtuaLabQ improves the students' performance in experiments accomplished in a hands-on chemistry laboratory. Two sets of laboratory experiments were conducted, in wich students first performed online activities in VirtuaLabQ and after in the hands-on laboratory, during regular class time. Also, students answered questionnaires evaluating the performance of each experiment in virtual and hands-on laboratory. Four questions were chosen to be analyzed in order to check the main target of this work. Results indicate that the integration of virtual and hands-on experiments in a Chemistry undergraduate course assists in the good performance of students in a hands-on laboratory and can contribute to the improvement of student learning. However, improvements in VirtuaLabQ and new case studies are necessary to confirm these findings, considering, for example, other kind of evaluations that effectively compare student performance besides self-evaluation.

The Aims of this paper is to analyze the influence of Remote Lab on overcoming the limitation of practicum facilities. This study uses qualitative research methods. In this study, the researchers conducting a study of the use of remote labs in overcoming the unavailability of laboratory equipment. 1). The completeness of practicum equipment available at SMKs is still inadequate, only around 30%. Some students stated that when carrying out practical activities, each tool used by 4 students simultaneously made the practicum process not run effectively and often there was discrimination only intelligent students who could complete the sequence, then some students also stated that the existing components many have been damaged. Another statement expressed by students that not all productive subjects can be practiced because of limited equipment that can be caused by several factors including: a) inadequate school budget; b) tools and practice materials that are difficult to obtain; 2) The Remote LAB application sends data at any time when selecting a Lab, selecting a Gate, and selecting input from a gate. The output of the gate will be measured using a multi-meter and oscilloscope and will be monitored directly via YouTube streaming, so that it can be monitored in real time on the Remote LAB Android application; 3) Practical experience does not have to be identical in a laboratory room on a supervised Schools. Students receive tangible observations using real equipment to arrive at concrete conclusions, as well as assessing them in a physical laboratory with equipment so that it will be beneficial to improve their laboratory abilities.

This paper describes a practical case study on the benefits and feasibility of a virtual laboratory as a part of chemistry laboratory exercises. Three different objectives that must fit together to create an efficient Virtual Reality (VR) learning experience were found: relevant information content, learning design, and technical feasibility. To achieve these multidisciplinary goals, a simple framework for designing VR learning materials was created. A 360-VR version of a chemistry laboratory exercise was designed and created following this framework. Data on its effectiveness was collected on a laboratory course with over 150 first-year chemical engineering students. The students completed the same laboratory exercise both as a virtual laboratory and in a real student laboratory. In the student feedback, students clearly stated that virtual laboratories cannot replace the experience in a real laboratory, and that the virtual laboratory exercises did not directly increase student motivation. Nevertheless, students showed a very positive attitude towards virtual learning materials and suggested including even more activating materials such as quizzes and interactive videos in the learning materials. Only a few students reported any downsides related to the virtual laboratory exercise. Overall, it was shown that our design principles work in practice as the students reported several real benefits when they completed a virtual laboratory exercise before the real-life laboratory exercise. These benefits included learning the correct way that the laboratory exercise proceeds and how to perform certain tasks correctly.

The rapid transition to remote teaching in the spring of 2020 posed particular challenges for laboratory courses, which often involve students working hands-on with equipment in collaborative environments. Replicating in-person experiments was especially challenging for advanced lab courses that utilize specialized apparatus, which could not be accessed by students at home. However, physics lab instructors employed a variety of creative strategies to overcome these barriers and provide students access to lab-like learning in a remote setting. We report on one advanced lab course that used the transition to remote teaching to completely redefine the course goals and transition from traditional prescriptive labs to more open-ended projects. We conduct a case study analysis, triangulating among several data sources-survey responses and interviews from both instructor and students-to construct an in-depth understanding of the remote course and how students experienced it. Although we cannot necessarily generalize the results of this analysis to the entire student experience in the course due to the student response rate, the feedback that the course did receive from both students and the instructor was overwhelmingly positive, and the instructors are planning to retain the open-ended projects when the course returns to an in-person format. We find that the new open-ended projects afforded students opportunities to make decisions and think deeply about their experiments, which students report as contributing to their enjoyment and satisfaction with the course. Students had mixed group work experiences, with some describing positive and meaningful interactions and others describing group work as a source of frustration and stress. Additionally, some students missed being able to work hands-on with equipment, and some reported a high workload that made the course stressful. We discuss these student experiences and provide implications for both in-person and remote lab courses.

The arts program has been available for Swedish upper secondary school students since the beginning of the 1990s. The program, which has a nationally standardized curriculum, has become one of the most popular study programs. Currently, the upper secondary school system is subject to reform. This article examines students' experiences of choosing theatre as their main subject in upper secondary education. A preliminary analysis is presented which is based on data from an open-ended inquiry answered by thirty students. The students' responses actualize the dimension between drama as personal development and theatre as artistic performance. There seems to be consensus about theatre studies generating both personal development and specific skills. The students also appreciate the variation and stimulation that theatre brings compared with “ordinary” school subjects. This is true even for less-motivated students who claim that theatre helps them to make it through upper secondary school. “Theatre is underestimated—it does more for you than you believe” (Swedish upper secondary school student).

During the 1990s, neoliberal reforms in Sweden increased local school actors' possibilities to develop school profiles regarding both organization and content. This restructuring has increased the total number of school sports programs as well as the possibilities for upper secondary schools and sports clubs to develop elite and amateur sports on a local level. In a new educational reform, the Swedish Government criticizes parts of the Swedish school sports system. The Government believes that the majority of local school sports programs and courses obstruct the maintenance of national equivalence, that upper secondary schools use school sports to attract pupils for economic reasons and that some pupils involved in school sports may fail to reach the academic or vocational goals of regular upper secondary education. Using critical discourse analysis, the present paper illustrates how educational policies are linked to wider symbolic meaning systems in an attempt to legitimize, define and organize upper secondary schools and to characterize pupils as either eligible or ineligible to participate in school sports. The analyses are based on various types of empirical data: policy documents, official letters from the sports movement on the government bill and in-depth interviews. The results indicate that the reform represents a shift in the policy rhetoric: from a normative rhetoric highlighting pupils' social and emotional reasons for choosing school sports, to a rational rhetoric emphasizing efficiency, standardization and regulation of pupils' educational choices. Using school sports as an example, the paper shows how the main aim of the reform—to raise educational standards and maintain national equivalence—is achieved through social differentiation, meaning that pupils with the right performance indicators are selected for participation in programs to which they are suited.