Remote Laboratories for Teaching and Training in Engineering

Typical mechatronic systems are a combination of advanced technologies involving several disciplines. This multidisciplinary approach to the development of industrial applications provides great opportunities for the implementation of e-learning environments and collaborative schemes. Engineering education, in particular, benefits from many of these advances, among which, virtual instrumentation is a useful tool for the development of virtual environments, e-learning spaces and, particularly, remote laboratories. This chapter describes the implementation of web-based laboratories that allow the remote operation of experiments used as training exercises in undergraduate engineering courses. The remote laboratories were developed using LabVIEW® software, and they enable remote control and monitoring of laboratory equipment, allowing engineering students to perform experiments in real time, at their own pace, from anywhere, and whenever is suitable for them. Besides the experimental training that the web-based laboratories provide to students, the system is also a powerful teaching tool since real-time demonstrations of the experiments can be performed, and they also can be simultaneously monitored by a group of students. This approach is highly beneficial for engineering schools in developing countries, as resources can be shared through the Internet. A description of the system and three proposed experiments is presented, together with the experimental results

IT Teaching Labs: Innovations in a Distance Education Era

Computer laboratories, or simply labs, are crucial in many fields including Information Technologies (IT), Management Information Systems (MIS), Computer Science (CS) and Software Engineering (SE). Labs play a vital role in helping students achieve the know-how and develop problem solving, communication and collaboration skills. Traditional labs comprising desktop computers organized into lines or U shapes have been around for almost forty years. Many of the contemporary labs look very different from their ancestors they are designed to facilitate a myriad of learning activities including solo learning, testing and perhaps foremost, collaborative group work. This paper reviews some ergonomics issues and investigates examples of innovative labs being developed nowadays. We elaborate on the innovative labs\u27 powerfulness in addressing the drawbacks of traditional labs as well in supporting innovative teaching methods, student creativity and interactions, and the education eco-system engagement. Further, we present several ergonomic tips as a lab proposal for Zayed University (ZU) and under the computing education research umbrella

Enhancing the graduates’ employability and career development through building information modelling intensive training

Building Information Modelling (BIM) is an emerging technological process which highly promotes a better collaborative working environment in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry. It is essential that the Higher Education (HE) sector innovates its education system to integrate between different disciplines in the AEC industry to encourage the adoption of BIM. In conjunction with this, BIM Intensive Training was conducted for a selected number of final year undergraduate students at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia. They were assigned a real time construction project, utilizing BIM software applications for model authoring, model review, 4D modelling and project coordination. It was observed that the participants were able to overcome various challenges through information sharing and team collaboration. A BIM coordination workflow was produced during the training to assist them in organizing their work. Although their existing knowledge of BIM and their skills using the software applications were quite limited, they were capable in learning expeditiously as the assignment provided them with real-world problems. A year after the training, more than half of the participants agreed that the training had helped them to secure their employment and excel in their current involvements in BIM-based projects. However, due to the current scenario many firms are yet to embrace BIM, there are participants who could not utilize the training. Hence, the establishment of a dynamic and continuous collaboration between professionals and HE sector is the way forward in transforming the traditional structure of AEC industry into a more collaborative and technological approach

A web-oriented framework for the development and deployment of academic facing administrative tools and services

The demand for higher education has increased dramatically in the last decade. At the same time, institutions have faced continual pressure to reduce costs and increase quality of education, while delivering that education to greater numbers of students. The introduction of software systems such as virtual learning environments, online learning resources and centralised student record systems has become routine in attempts to address these demands. However, these approaches suffer from a variety of limitations: They do not take all stakeholders’ needs into account. They do not seek to reduce administrative overheads in academic processes. They do not reflect institution-specific academic policies. They do not integrate readily with other information systems. They are not capable of adequately modelling the complex authorisation roles and organisational structure of a real institution. They are not well suited to rapidly changing policies and requirements. Their implementation is not informed by sound software engineering practises or data architecture design. Crucially, as a consequence of these drawbacks such systems can increase administrative workload for academic staff. This thesis describes the research, development and deployment of a system which seeks to address these limitations, the Module Management System (MMS). MMS is a collaborative web application targeted at streamlining and minimising administrative tasks. MMS encapsulates a number of user-facing tools for tasks including coursework submission and marking, tutorial attendance tracking, exam mark recording and final grade calculation. These tools are supported by a framework which acts as a form of “university operating system”. This framework provides a number of different services including an institution abstraction layer, role-based views and privileges, security policy support integration with external systems

An integrated modeling framework for infrastructure system-of-systems simulation

Design of future hard infrastructure must consider emergent behaviors from cross-system interdependencies. Understanding these interdependencies is challenging due to high levels of integration in high-performance systems and their operation as a collaborative system-of-systems managed by multiple organizations. Existing modeling frameworks have limitations for strategic planning either because important spatial structure attributes have been abstracted out or behavioral models are oriented to shorter-term analysis with a static network structure. This paper presents a formal modeling framework as a first step to integrating infrastructure system models in a system-of-systems simulation addressing these concerns. First, a graph-theoretic structural framework captures the spatial dimension of physical infrastructure. An element's simulation state includes location, parent, resource contents, and operational state properties. Second, a functional behavioral framework captures the temporal dimension of infrastructure operations at a level suitable for strategic analysis. Resource behaviors determine the flow of resources into or out of nodes and element behaviors modify other state including the network structure. Two application use cases illustrate the usefulness of the modeling framework in varying contexts. The first case applies the framework to future space exploration infrastructure with an emphasis on mobile system elements and discrete resource flows. The second case applies the framework to infrastructure investment in Saudi Arabia with an emphasis on immobile system elements aggregated at the city level and continuous resource flows. Finally, conclusions present future work planned for implementing the framework in a simulation software tool.American Society for Engineering Education. National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowshi

Towards collaborative learning via shared artefacts over the Grid

The Web is the most pervasive collaborative technology in widespread use today; and its use to support eLearning has been highly successful. There are many web-based Virtual Learning Environments such as WebCT, FirstClass, and BlackBoard as well as associated web-based Managed Learning Environments. In the future, the Grid promises to provide an extremely powerful infrastructure allowing both learners and teachers to collaborate in various learning contexts and to share learning materials, learning processes, learning systems, and experiences. This position paper addresses the role of support for sharing artefacts in distributed systems such as the Grid. An analogy is made between collaborative software development and collaborative learning with the goal of gaining insights into the requisite support for artefact sharing within the eLearning community

Project Management Learning in a Collaborative Distant Learning Context - An Actual On-going Experience

The goal of this paper is to show the results of an on-going experience on teaching project management to grade students by following a development scheme of management related competencies on an individual basis. In order to achieve that goal, the students are organized in teams that must solve a problem and manage the development of a feasible solution to satisfy the needs of a client. The innovative component advocated in this paper is the formal introduction of negotiating and virtual team management aspects, as different teams from different universities at different locations and comprising students with different backgrounds must collaborate and compete amongst them. The different learning aspects are identified and the improvement levels are reflected in a rubric that has been designed ad hoc for this experience. Finally, the effort frameworks for the student and instructor have been established according to the requirements of the Bologna paradigms. This experience is developed through a software-based support system allowing blended learning for the theoretical and individual?s work aspects, blogs, wikis, etc., as well as project management tools based on WWW that allow the monitoring of not only the expected deliverables and the achievement of the goals but also the progress made on learning as established in the defined rubri

Cloud-Based Collaborative 3D Modeling to Train Engineers for the Industry 4.0

In the present study, Autodesk Fusion 360 software (which includes the A360 environment) is used to train engineering students for the demands of the industry 4.0. Fusion 360 is a tool that unifies product lifecycle management (PLM) applications and 3D-modeling software (PDLM—product design and life management). The main objective of the research is to deepen the students’ perception of the use of a PDLM application and its dependence on three categorical variables: PLM previous knowledge, individual practices and collaborative engineering perception. Therefore, a collaborative graphic simulation of an engineering project is proposed in the engineering graphics subject at the University of La Laguna with 65 engineering undergraduate students. A scale to measure the perception of the use of PDLM is designed, applied and validated. Subsequently, descriptive analyses, contingency graphical analyses and non-parametric analysis of variance are performed. The results indicate a high overall reception of this type of experience and that it helps them understand how professionals work in collaborative environments. It is concluded that it is possible to respond to the demand of the industry needs in future engineers through training programs of collaborative 3D modeling environments

Determination and evaluation of web accessibility

The Web is the most pervasive collaborative technology in widespread use today; however, access to the web and its many applications cannot be taken for granted. Web accessibility encompasses a variety of concerns ranging from societal, political, and economic to individual, physical, and intellectual through to the purely technical. Thus, there are many perspectives from which web accessibility can be understood and evaluated. In order to discuss these concerns and to gain a better understanding of web accessibility, an accessibility framework is proposed using as its base a layered evaluation framework from Computer Supported Co-operative Work research and the ISO standard, ISO/IEC 9126 on software quality. The former is employed in recognition of the collaborative nature of the web and its importance in facilitating communication. The latter is employed to refine and extend the technical issues and to highlight the need for considering accessibility from the viewpoint of the web developer and maintainer as well as the web user. A technically inaccessible web is unlikely to be evolved over time. A final goal of the accessibility framework is to provide web developers and maintainers with a practical basis for considering web accessibility through the development of a set of accessibility factors associated with each identified layer