Quality Assessment for E-learning: a Benchmarking Approach (Third edition)

The primary purpose of this manual is to provide a set of benchmarks, quality criteria and notes for guidance against which e-learning programmes and their support systems may be judged. The manual should therefore be seen primarily as a reference tool for the assessment or review of e-learning programmes and the systems which support them. However, the manual should also prove to be useful to staff in institutions concerned with the design, development, teaching, assessment and support of e-learning programmes. It is hoped that course developers, teachers and other stakeholders will see the manual as a useful development and/or improvement tool for incorporation in their own institutional systems of monitoring, evaluation and enhancement

Virtual Reality Training Application for the Condition-Based Maintenance of Induction Motors

The incorporation of new technologies as training methods, such as virtual reality (VR), facilitates instruction when compared to traditional approaches, which have shown strong limitations in their ability to engage young students who have grown up in the smartphone culture of continuous entertainment. Moreover, not all educational centers or organizations are able to incorporate specialized labs or equipment for training and instruction. Using VR applications, it is possible to reproduce training programs with a high rate of similarity to real programs, filling the gap in traditional training. In addition, it reduces unnecessary investment and prevents economic losses, avoiding unnecessary damage to laboratory equipment. The contribution of this work focuses on the development of a VR-based teaching and training application for the condition-based maintenance of induction motors. The novelty of this research relies mainly on the use of natural interactions with the VR environment and the design’s optimization of the VR application in terms of the proposed teaching topics. The application is comprised of two training modules. The first module is focused on the main components of induction motors, the assembly of workbenches and familiarization with induction motor components. The second module employs motor current signature analysis (MCSA) to detect induction motor failures, such as broken rotor bars, misalignments, unbalances, and gradual wear on gear case teeth. Finally, the usability of this VR tool has been validated with both graduate and undergraduate students, assuring the suitability of this tool for: (1) learning basic knowledge and (2) training in practical skills related to the condition-based maintenance of induction motors.This research has been partially supported by Banco Santander under the scholarship program Santander Iberoamérica Research 2019/20. This investigation was partially supported by the ACIS project (Reference Number INVESTUN/21/BU/0002) of the Consejeria de Empleo of the Junta de Castilla y León (Spain)

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

A New Laboratory for Hands-on Teaching of Electrical Engineering

© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. This paper describes an innovative laboratory for students in Electrical Engineering courses, which is recently established at the Energy Department of Politecnico di Torino, Italy. The main peculiarities of the lab are the high ICT content of each test rig, the multidisciplinary experiences, and the hands-on teaching methodology, allowing the student to have access in overall safety to many complex electrical/electromechanical systems. Currently, eight courses of Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in electrical engineering carry out in-class exercises and hands-on experiments in the new lab, serving over 200 students in total per year. The innovative lab also allows for external collaborations with companies and institutions for specific (and in some cases permanent) training offers, like a one-day per month LabVIEW course for faculty and staff members of Politecnico di Torino

High-Performance Cloud Computing: A View of Scientific Applications

Scientific computing often requires the availability of a massive number of computers for performing large scale experiments. Traditionally, these needs have been addressed by using high-performance computing solutions and installed facilities such as clusters and super computers, which are difficult to setup, maintain, and operate. Cloud computing provides scientists with a completely new model of utilizing the computing infrastructure. Compute resources, storage resources, as well as applications, can be dynamically provisioned (and integrated within the existing infrastructure) on a pay per use basis. These resources can be released when they are no more needed. Such services are often offered within the context of a Service Level Agreement (SLA), which ensure the desired Quality of Service (QoS). Aneka, an enterprise Cloud computing solution, harnesses the power of compute resources by relying on private and public Clouds and delivers to users the desired QoS. Its flexible and service based infrastructure supports multiple programming paradigms that make Aneka address a variety of different scenarios: from finance applications to computational science. As examples of scientific computing in the Cloud, we present a preliminary case study on using Aneka for the classification of gene expression data and the execution of fMRI brain imaging workflow.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures, conference pape

Platform, tools and methodology for experimental learning improvement in electronics engineering and their applications fields

221 p.La adaptación al nuevo Espacio Europeo de Educación Superior (EEES) está suponiendo un reto en muchas universidades, entre ellas la Universidad del País Vasco (UPV/EHU), para poner en marcha una transformación de las metodologías enseñanza-aprendizaje, de las actitudes tanto de los profesores como de los estudiantes y, por supuesto, de los sistemas evaluación, entre otras muchas cuestiones. Como ejemplo de esta transformación, la UPV/EHU lleva años promoviendo el aprendizaje activo y cooperativo mediante el modelo pedagógico IKD (Ikasketa Kooperatibo eta Dinamikoa, Aprendizaje Dinámico y Cooperativo). Basándose en este modelo pedagógico, en la Escuela de Ingeniería de Bilbao se han venido desarrollando diferentes estrategias educativas que buscan mejorar muchos de los aspectos relacionados con la educación en ingeniería.La introducción de una novedosa metodología de aprendizaje basada en proyectos, combinada con la implantación de unas actividades prácticas de desensamblado, análisis y ensamblado funcional y todo ello desarrollado sobre escenarios industriales específicos, crea un nuevo entorno educativo que se convierte posiblemente en una de las contribuciones más innovadoras de esta tesis. La visión mejorada del estudiante sobre el conocimiento teórico como solución para el diseño tecnológico, la efectividad del trabajo en equipo y, finalmente, el desarrollo de competencias profesionales relevantes son algunos de los resultados más destacables de este trabajo.Los resultados obtenidos a lo largo de estos años se contrastan mediante el reconocimiento externo, con la publicación en revistas internacionales, tales como IEEE Transaction on Education, International Journal Engineering Education, International Journal of Electrical Engineering Education (indexadas en el JCR), así como en diferentes congresos internacionales de reconocido prestigio