VISIR: experiences and challenges

It is of crucial importance the integration of practical sessions in engineering curricula owing to their significant role in understanding engineering concepts and scientific phenomena. However, the lack of practical sessions due to the high costs of the equipment and the unavailability of instructors has caused a significant declination in experimentation in engineering education. Remote laboratories have tackled this issues providing online reusable and shared workbenches unconstrained by neither geographical nor time considerations. Thereby, they have extremely proliferated among universities and integrated into engineering curricula over the last decade. This contribution compiles diverse experiences based on the deployment of the remote laboratory, Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality (VISIR), on the practices of undergraduate engineering grades at various universities within the VISIR community. It aims to show the impact of its usage on engineering education concerning the assessments of students and teachers as well. In addition, the paper address the next challenges and future works carried out at several universities within the VISIR community

Experimenting in PILAR Federation: a Common Path for the Future

The PILAR (Platform Integration of Laboratories based on the Architecture of visiR) Erasmus Plus project started in September 2016 and will last three years. The core of the PILAR project is the VISIR remote laboratory —Virtual Instruments System In Reality—. The project aims for a federation of five of the existing VISIR nodes, sharing experiments, capacity and resources among partners, and to provide access to VISIR remote lab, through PILAR consortium, to students from other educational institutions. PILAR will be the framework from which management tasks will be performed and laboratories/experiments will be shared. PILAR will also foster the Special Interest Group of VISIR under the Global Online Laboratory Consortium (GOLC) of the International Association of Online Engineering (IAOE).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Issues Faced in a Remote Instrumentation Laboratory

An Online Lab is a multi-university shared laboratory environment, where students can exercise their knowledge as they would do in a physical lab. The idea is to have maximum resource utilization and collaboration between universities by sharing of ideas. This kind of remote laboratory negates the economic issues to set up a laboratory and allows every student to have an experience of real laboratory. As part of Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) Robotics Lab project a study on state of art of remote labs was conducted. This paper discusses some key issues in the design and operation of such remote labs. The lab should be remotely usable by a large student body, with varied levels of sophistication, all the way from elementary learners, to PhD students doing research. In addition, the high design load implies that the architecture should be highly parallel, and structurally reliable

PILAR: a Federation of VISIR Remote Laboratory Systems for Educational Open Activities

Social demands have promoted an educational approach based on an “anywhere and anytime” premise. Remote laboratories have emerged as the answer to the demands of technical educational areas for adapting themselves to this scenario. The result has not only benefit distance learning students but has provided new learning scenarios both for teachers and students as well as allowing a flexible approach to experimental topics. However, as any other solution for providing practical scenarios (hands-on labs, virtual labs or simulators), remote labs face several constraints inherited from the subsystems of its deployment hardware (real instruments, equipment and scenario) and software (analog/digital conversions, communications, workbenches, etc.). This paper describes the Erasmus+ project Platform Integration of Laboratories based on the Architecture of visiR (PILAR) which deals with several units of the federation installed in different educational institutions and devoted to analog electronics and electrical circuits. Based on the limitations of remote labs, the need for the federation will be justified and its benefits will be described by taking advantage of its strengths. The challenges that have come up during the different stages and the different approaches to design are also going to be described and analyzedinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A federation of online labs for assisting science and engineering education in the MENA Region

Tese de doutoramento, Engenharia Informática, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia, Universidade do Algarve, 2017Education is now more widely available than ever before. In a great part, this is due to the usage of digital tools, applications and online services by students and teachers. In fact, the Internet has hugely increased the availability of educational resources and also prompted additional collaboration and cooperation among institutions and among countries. Today, active learning methods offer several techniques that have been adopted by teachers to bring efficient learning experiences for the students. Learning by doing promotes successful learning by providing varied experiences to the students in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields. In addition, with continued practice, the students learn the contents of lessons and develop their skills by using all available resources. This leads to effective learning and effective acquisition of knowledge, and helps in building a strong relationship among students and between them and their teachers. In recent decades, instructional technologies have supported higher education systems well. They have offered several active learning methods to institutions, for instance online labs. Several projects in online labs area are being done worldwide, at present. Generally, the supporting idea of online labs is to offer additional access to remote experiments to students in different disciplines, 24/7 without substantial increase in cost per student around the world and especially in countries with limited resources. Moreover, they allow students to spend more time on experiments and increase their ability and skills through a simple computer connected to the Internet. This study focuses on the higher education systems in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. It discusses the level of collaboration and cooperation work among researchers in this region, particularly in online labs fields. It offers new perspectives and new ways to increase that work by creating the Community of Practices (CoP) around online labs and also by promoting the idea of federation new and existing online labs.O ensino é, hoje em dia, mais acessível à generalidade da população mundial do que em qualquer momento do passado. Isso deve-se, em grande parte, à utilização de ferramentas digitais, de aplicações informáticas e de serviços online, pelos professores e pelos estudantes. Com efeito, a Internet fez aumentar imenso a disponibilidade de recursos educativos e, simultaneamente, proporcionou o desenvolvimento dos intercâmbios e das colaborações entre as instituições de ensino superior e entre os diversos países. As várias técnicas que integram os métodos de ensino ativo têm vindo a ser adotadas progressivamente pelos professores, dessa maneira proporcionando aos estudantes percursos de aprendizagem mais aliciantes e mais profícuos. Aprender fazendo promove o sucesso na aprendizagem por via da realização de experiências práticas nos vários domínios da Ciência, Tecnologia, Engenharia e Matemática. Além do que, dessa maneira os estudantes assimilam os conteúdos programáticos e desenvolvem as suas capacidades, atingindo mais eficazmente os objetivos do estudo. Isto conduz a uma aprendizagem mais conseguida e a uma real aquisição de conhecimentos, fomentando, ao mesmo tempo, um relacionamento mais forte entre estudantes e também entre estudantes e professores. Nas últimas décadas, o funcionamento das instituições do ensino superior tem vindo a apoiar-se cada vez mais nas tecnologias de ensino. Entre as diversas tecnologias que foram adotadas, contam-se os laboratórios online. Existem, atualmente, diversos projetos neste domínio, com vasta cobertura. Resumidamente, a visão dos promotores dos laboratórios online é proporcionar aos estudantes das diversas disciplinas acesso remoto a experiências práticas, 24 horas por dia. Isto deve ser conseguido sem que as instituições de ensino superior tenham de incorrer em gastos substanciais, de modo a possibilitar a adoção dos laboratórios online por países que atravessem dificuldades económicas. Com os laboratórios online, os estudantes têm oportunidade de realizar mais experiências do que realizariam de outro modo e, assim, desenvolver mais eficazmente as suas capacidades científicas e tecnológicas. E isso conseguir-se-á por via de um simples computador ligado à Internet. O presente estudo centra-se nos sistemas de ensino superior dos países do Médio Oriente e do Norte de África, em inglês, Middle East and North Africa, MENA. Analisamos, em particular, o nível de colaboração existente entre os investigadores desta região, no domínio dos laboratórios online, e propomos novas perspetivas para o desenvolvimento do trabalho desses investigadores, por meio de da criação de uma comunidade de prática (em inglês community of practice) sobre o tema dos laboratórios online. Adicionalmente, propomos a criação de uma federação de laboratórios online, que agrupará laboratórios dispersos pelo mundo, já existentes ou a criar, assim facilitando a sua utilização à escala mundial

VISIR federation: Initial building steps (PILAR experience – work in progress)

Collaborative working as well as sharing resources and knowledge represent key points in today's development in all fields, including education. Know-how transfer and collaboration in learning and teaching are aspects promoted and sustained by institutional management as well as the European initiatives. Thus, leading to the idea of a federation which will facilitate engineering education. A consortium formed by five European universities decided to join efforts to provide to the community a federation, which could be used by different stakeholders interest in teaching, learning or developing new skills in the field of electronics. The proposed remote system, Virtual Instruments System in Reality, or VISIR in short, offers the possibility of working with real equipment and obtain the real-world/ real-time measurements. By developing such a VISIR federation some of the constraints of using remote labs, the ones associated with development and maintenance costs, and scalability, will be minimized.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Overview of modern teaching equipment that supports distant learning

Laboratory is a key element of engineering and applied sciences educational systems. With the development of Internet and connecting IT technologies, the appearance of remote laboratories was inevitable. Virtual laboratories are also available; they place the experiment in a simulated environment. However, this writing focuses on remote experiments not virtual ones. From the students’ point of view, it is a great help not only for those enrolling in distant or online courses but also for those studying in a more traditional way. With the spread of smart, portable devices capable of connection to the internet, students can expand or restructure time spent on studying. This is a huge help to them and also allows them to individually divide their time up, to learn how to self-study. This independent approach can prepare them for working environments. It offers flexibility and convenience to the students. From the universities’ point of view, it helps reduce maintenance costs and universities can share experiments which also helps the not so well-resourced educational facilities

Chapter 1

Experimenting is fundamental to the training process of all scientists and engineers. While experiments have been traditionally done inside laboratories, the emergence of Information and Communication Technologies added two alter-natives accessible anytime, anywhere. These two alternatives are known as virtual and remote labs, and are sometimes indistinguishably referred as online labs. Sim-ilarly to other instructional technologies, virtual and remote labs require some ef-fort from teachers in integrating them into curricula, taking into consideration sev-eral factors that affect their adoption (i.e. cost) and their educational effectiveness (i.e. benefit). This chapter analyses these two dimensions and sustains the case where only through international cooperation it is possible to serve the large num-ber of teachers and students involved in engineering education. It presents an ex-ample in the area of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, based on a remote lab named Virtual Instruments System in Reality, and it then describes how a number of European and Latin-American institutions have been cooperating under the scope of an Erasmus+ project2, for spreading its use in Brazil and Argentina.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Using a 3-tier Training Model for Effective Exchange of Good Practices in as ERASMUS+ Project

VISIR+ is an Erasmus+ project that aims to develop educational modules for electric and electronic circuits theory and practice following an enquiry-based teaching and learning methodology. The project has installed five new VISIR remote labs in Higher Education Institutions located in Argentina and Brazil, to allow students doing more experiments and hence acquire better experimental skills, through a combination of traditional (hands-on), remote and virtual laboratories. A key aspect for the success of this project was to motivate and train teachers in the underpinning educational methodology. As such, VISIR+ adopted a 3-tier training process to effectively support the use of VISIR in the Institutions that received it. This process is based on the “train the trainer” approach, which required the participating partner institutions to identify and engage a number of associated partners, interested in using their newly installed remote lab. To measure the quality of the training process, the same satisfaction questionnaire was used in all training actions. This paper presents a detailed description of the training actions along with the analysis of the satisfaction questionnaire results. Major conclusions are that the quality level of the training process remained practically the same across all training actions and that trainees sometimes considered the practical use of the VISIR remote lab as difficult, irrespectively of where and when the training action took place.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Modelo de Evolução dos Laboratórios Remotos e Virtuais

Nesta dissertação propõe-se um modelo que descreve e prevê a evolução dos sistemas e redes de laboratórios remotos e virtuais. Este modelo tem como base a Teoria Geral de Sistemas proposta por Ludwig Von Bertalanffy e o conceito de acoplamento estrutural proposto por João Bosco de Mota Alves no seu livro Teoria Geral de Sistemas. O autor introduz neste modelo o novo conceito de acoplamento energético, baseado na vontade e dinâmica de quem constrói e mantém os sistemas de laboratórios remotos e virtuais. Pretende-se mostrar assim através do modelo proposto que atendendo aos conceitos de acoplamento energético e acoplamento estrutural, os sistemas e redes de laboratórios remotos e virtuais seguem as premissas e postulados definidos por Charles Darwin na sua obra The Origin of Species. Para conseguir este fim colocaram-se as seguintes questões centrais de pesquisa, sendo a primeira a principal e as duas seguintes complementares: “É possível explicar e predizer a evolução de um sistema de laboratórios remotos e virtuais analisando a sua história de desenvolvimento e as razões (acoplamentos estruturais e energéticos) que estão por detrás da sua adaptação ao ambiente envolvente?” “Será que a evolução dos laboratórios remotos e virtuais também segue as leis da natureza?” “Os laboratórios remotos e virtuais conseguem eles próprios adaptar-se ao ambiente envolvente?” Para responder a estas questões, construir e desenvolver, validar e verificar o modelo apresentado, realizaram-se as seguintes etapas de trabalho: estudo da teoria da evolução das espécies de Darwin, assim como todos os seus fundamentos e conceitos; estudo da General Systems Theory de Ludwig van Bertalanffi e do livro Teoria Geral de Sistemas de João Bosco; definição do conceito de “Acoplamento Energético” como uma extensão dos conceitos do livro General Systems Theory baseado no conceito de “acoplamento estrutural” desenvolvido por João Bosco no livro Teoria Geral de Sistemas; consolidação do conceito de “laboratório remoto” ou “laboratório virtual”, como um sistema com “acoplamento estrutural” e “acoplamento energético”; análise das origens dos laboratórios remotos; produção de uma linha temporal que retracta a história dos laboratórios remotos e virtuais desde o seu início até aos nossos dias; análise das diferentes linhas de desenvolvimento dos laboratórios remotos e virtuais e consequente apresentação do estado-de-arte; proposta do modelo e sua validação e verificação, considerando o “passado remoto” e o “passado recente”, para fazer uma projecção sobre a evolução futura em cada uma das linhas de desenvolvimento que estão “vivas” hoje; e, finalmente, apresentação das conclusões do estudo e previsão da evolução de linhas de desenvolvimento. Do estudo desenvolvido, e da validação e verificação do modelo proposto, concluiu-se que é possível explicar e predizer a evolução de um sistema de laboratórios remotos e virtuais analisando a sua história de desenvolvimento, os seus acoplamentos estruturais e energéticos, e a sua interação com o meio ambiente. Estas dimensões traduzem sempre uma adaptação do sistema ao meio envolvente, que aumenta as suas possibilidades de sobrevivência, confirmando-se assim a hipótese de que que os sistemas de laboratórios remotos e virtuais seguem as leis da evolução Darwianiana, decorrente do desenvolvimento dum acoplamento energético real e funcional com as pessoas que os criaram e os mantém em funcionamento