A Web-based Environment Providing Remote Access to FPGA Platforms for Teaching Digital Hardware Design

In this work we present the design and implementation of a Web-based application for remote access to the FPGA boards in a Digital Design Laboratory. It enables students from specialization courses to afford the design exercises at any place and time, even at home, just with an Internet access and a Web browser. At the same time, it opens the possibility of prototyping small designs to the rest of students which have no access rights to the physical Laboratory

Remote Laboratory for E-Learning of Systems on Chip and Their Applications to Nuclear and Scientific Instrumentation

Configuring and setting up a remote access laboratory for an advanced online school on fully programmable System-on-Chip (SoC) proved to be an outstanding challenge. The school, jointly organized by the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), focused on SoC and its applications to nuclear and scientific instrumentation and was mainly addressed to physicists, computer scientists and engineers from developing countries. The use of e-learning tools, which some of them adopted and others developed, allowed the school participants to directly access both integrated development environment software and programmable SoC platforms. This facilitated the follow-up of all proposed exercises and the final project. During the four weeks of the training activity, we faced and overcame different technology and communication challenges, whose solutions we describe in detail together with dedicated tools and design methodology. We finally present a summary of the gained experience and an assessment of the results we achieved, addressed to those who foresee to organize similar initiatives using e-learning for advanced training with remote access to SoC platforms

E-Learning

E-learning enables students to pace their studies according to their needs, making learning accessible to (1) people who do not have enough free time for studying - they can program their lessons according to their available schedule; (2) those far from a school (geographical issues), or the ones unable to attend classes due to some physical or medical restriction. Therefore, cultural, geographical and physical obstructions can be removed, making it possible for students to select their path and time for the learning course. Students are then allowed to choose the main objectives they are suitable to fulfill. This book regards E-learning challenges, opening a way to understand and discuss questions related to long-distance and lifelong learning, E-learning for people with special needs and, lastly, presenting case study about the relationship between the quality of interaction and the quality of learning achieved in experiences of E-learning formation

Development of Telephone-based e-Learning Portal

The proliferation of mobile phones in Nigeria, particularly among the student community, has continued to inspire the development and delivery of e-Learning applications. Most of the existing web-based e-Learning applications do not support nomadic voice-based learning (i.e. learning on the move through voice), and consequently do not provide a speedy access to information or enquiries on demand. Internet access is required to get every bit of information from most school portal system, which is not directly available to everyone. Lack of provision for voice in the existing web applications excludes support for people with limited capabilities such as the visually impaired and physical disabilities. In this paper, we present a design and development of a prototype telephone-based e-Learning portal that will be used for course registration and examination. This study is part of an ongoing e-Learning project involving the following modules: enrollment, course registration and examination, enquiries/information, messaging/collaboration, e-Learning and library. The prototype application was developed using VoiceXML for the voice user interface(VUI), PHP for database queries, Apache as the middle-ware and MySQL database as back-end. A unified modelling language (UML) was used to model and design the application. The proposed e-Learning system will compliment the web-based system in other to meet the needs of students with a range of disabilities such as visual impairment, repetitive strain injury, etc, that make reading and writing difficult. It also makes multiple platforms available to all users as well as boosting access to education for the physically challenged, particularly the sight impaired in the developing countries of the world. In institutions where students are not allowed to use mobile phones or where cost is an issue, then the alternative is the use of PC-phone

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

The DS-Pnet modeling formalism for cyber-physical system development

This work presents the DS-Pnet modeling formalism (Dataflow, Signals and Petri nets), designed for the development of cyber-physical systems, combining the characteristics of Petri nets and dataflows to support the modeling of mixed systems containing both reactive parts and data processing operations. Inheriting the features of the parent IOPT Petri net class, including an external interface composed of input and output signals and events, the addition of dataflow operations brings enhanced modeling capabilities to specify mathematical data transformations and graphically express the dependencies between signals. Data-centric systems, that do not require reactive controllers, are designed using pure dataflow models. Component based model composition enables reusing existing components, create libraries of previously tested components and hierarchically decompose complex systems into smaller sub-systems. A precise execution semantics was defined, considering the relationship between dataflow and Petri net nodes, providing an abstraction to define the interface between reactive controllers and input and output signals, including analog sensors and actuators. The new formalism is supported by the IOPT-Flow Web based tool framework, offering tools to design and edit models, simulate model execution on the Web browser, plus model-checking and software/hardware automatic code generation tools to implement controllers running on embedded devices (C,VHDL and JavaScript). A new communication protocol was created to permit the automatic implementation of distributed cyber-physical systems composed of networks of remote components communicating over the Internet. The editor tool connects directly to remote embedded devices running DS-Pnet models and may import remote components into new models, contributing to simplify the creation of distributed cyber-physical applications, where the communication between distributed components is specified just by drawing arcs. Several application examples were designed to validate the proposed formalism and the associated framework, ranging from hardware solutions, industrial applications to distributed software applications