Federated Electronic Practical Resources using PILAR as VISIR Integrated Tool

Practical training is a pillar in technical education. Traditionally, these benefits have been acquired through hands-on laboratory sessions. However, at present, the educational models trend to rely on distance education tools either totally (e-learning, m-learning, etc.) or partially (b-learning). To provide practical training in those educational scenarios is challenging. Remote laboratories --real laboratories, working on real systems and under real conditions, controlled remotely-- can play a fundamental role. Nevertheless, remote laboratories not only provide advantages, but disadvantages of both environments involved in the process: real laboratories and remote communications. Furthermore, remote laboratories add new limitations due to constructive constraints. VISIR (Virtual Instruments System In Reality) is a remote laboratory on top of the state of the art for wiring and measuring electrical and electronics circuits, but VISIR system has his own particular restrictions like any other remote lab. In this context, PILAR (Platform Integration of Laboratories based on the Architecture of visiR) Erasmus Plus project development aims for a federation of five of the existing VISIR nodes in Europe: Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH), Spanish University for Distance Education (UNED), University of Deusto (UDEUSTO), Carinthia University of Applied Sciences (CUAS), School of Engineering of Polytechnic of Porto (ISEP). This paper describes the benefits that PILAR project will provide to the consortium, and how these physical constraints of the VISIR system can be compensated through the federation, after one year and a half of the project development and having the first draft of the federation and weebsite running.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Assessment of information systems effectiveness in private and hospital pathology

This research investigates the role of laboratory information systems on business outcomes in medical pathology in Australia. Pathology information systems are inherently large-scale systems handling large numbers of data daily to service not only the pathology laboratory itself, but also referring medical practitioners. Patient results are often required in a "mission critical" time frame. This research confirms, through a survey and three focus groups, that pathology laboratories are unable to undertake strategic information systems planning (SISP). This research has also found that the factors that are critical to strategic planning in pathology laboratories in Australia are (a) laboratory information system capability (b) business-IT alignment (c) strategic spending (d) research and education (e) end-user involvement and (f) information system effectiveness. In both a survey analysis and focus groups, the impact of the laboratory information systems on business outcomes in pathology in Australia was visible from the pre-planning phase. The key findings from the research are that the laboratory information system is regarded by multiple departments of the health industry as a commodity and therefore is regarded as having no strategic value. This long held view has created a situation whereby pathology as a whole is regarded with little or no priority for funding in hospitals in Australia. Spending in private laboratories is functional and not strategic. There is a clear distinction between the functionality and the capability of the laboratory information system. The laboratory information system lacks the capability for integration with, and the use of, modern technology. There is no possibility for the laboratory information system to complement and enhance the strategic components of such activities as international expansion of private pathology in Australia. There is a lack of pressure within the private pathology industry in particular to take steps to develop the capability of the laboratory information system in Australia. A lack of active research and a lack of formal education into management and SISP in the medical and pathology industries is also a contributing factor to the acceptance of the existing status of laboratory information system capability. The lack of capability of the laboratory information system prevents it from fulfilling any strategic role. The ramifications of this are that contributors to successful SISP, such as business-IT alignment, are unable to occur. This then prevents effective SISP and hence the assessment of information system effectiveness to the detriment of business outcomes for pathology in Australia. This research provides a clear picture of a number of issues contributing to a lack of ability of pathology laboratories in Australia to undertake SISP. The research has also highlighted, through the concepts of a hypothesised relationship between SISP and information system effectiveness measurement, a means and a mechanism for change. The adoption of the principles of this research would assist in the achievement of a more uniform approach to laboratory information systems in Australia that would be beneficial to patients and pathology business alike

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

Managing artistic interventions in organisations: a comparative study of programmes in Europe

This report documents how organizations and artists are learning to learn together in new ways. It draws on experiences in France, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. Traditionally interactions between the world of the arts and other worlds, especially business, have been arm's length relationships, taking the form of philanthropy and corporate social responsibility. Over the past few decades more instrumental relationships have emerged in the form of sponsoring and corporate identity activities. In addition, there has recently been a growth of short-term artistic interventions embedded in corporate training or organisational change programmes, often organised by consultants. Only recently has a qualitatively new possibility been conceived: medium-term projects lasting several months, in which people from the world of the arts and the world of organisations seek to learn from each other and create new knowledge together. This report describes and compares six such artistic intervention programmes in five European countries. On the basis of interviews with the multiple stakeholders involved as well as site visits, the report shows that bridging between the two worlds requires numerous functions and processes that are often complex and time-consuming. They require persistence, flexibility and vision in order to create new kinds of "values-added" in organisations and for the arts. The need for bridge-building has engendered the emergence of intermediary organisations. The review documents that these new actors come in various organisational forms, and they have each developed their own approaches to initiating and enabling potential learning relationships between artists and organisations in other spheres. This comparative study therefore offers diverse models that can instruct and inspire other actors seeking to engage in artistic interventions

Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Production Systems and Logistics (CPSL 2021)

Proceedings of the CPSL 202

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

Fomento de las competencias experimentales utilizando recursos complementarios

[EN]The use of ICT in the academic context is a reality, in the world we live in. The young generation of students is digital native, being immersed in a virtual world during a considerable part of their day. This has an impact in their life, including on their education. In undergraduate engineering education laboratory classes are an integral part of its curriculum. These days, many laboratory classes combine traditional hands-on labs with online labs (remote and virtual labs) and several experimental resources. A “blended” or “hybrid” approach to experimental learning seems the most effective to (students’) experimental learning and the development of competences. Still this technologically mediated resource affects the way students learn and in the literature there is still a lack of works, considering the characterization of didactical implementations using a “blended” or “hybrid” approach and its impact in students’ learning and the way they construct their knowledge. In the Electric and Electronic Engineering topic and using the remote laboratory VISIR there are really very few works, reported in literature, describing some small scaled didactical experiments. The problematic which motivated this work was the need to understand the impact of different didactical approaches using this methodology (simultaneous use of several experimental resources) has on students’ academic results. Ultimately this work intends to contribute to fill a gap identified in the literature: identify factors (including some eventual students’ characteristics) which affect students’ learning and engagement in the electric and electronic circuits topic using the remote lab VISIR along with other complementary resources. To accomplish this end, four research questions where posed, each of them taking into account a set of factors in a specific field of inquiry and its influence on students’ results. The first research question approached the way the several experimental resources could be combined and its effect on students. The second dealt with the influence of the proposed VISIR tasks characteristics on students’ results. The third tackled important teacher mediation traces that could be linked to better students’ performance. And finally, the last research question investigates if there were students’ characteristics that were more associated with good learning outcomes and engagement. Considering the former objectives, it was chosen a multi-case study research methodology, using a mixed method approach, resourcing mainly to questionnaire, interview, documental analysis and observation as data gathering methods, and statistical analysis (descriptive and inferential) and content analysis, as data analysis techniques. A large-scale study analysis was conducted, including 26 courses (in a total of 43 didactical implementations using VISIR, as some of the courses have undergone more than one course implementation edition), comprising 1794 students and involving 52 different teachers. This study took place in several Higher Education Institutions (and at a minor extent, in some Technological and High Schools) in Argentina, Brazil and Portugal. In the southern hemisphere these didactical implementations happened in the 2016 and 2017 academic years while in the northern hemisphere it was possible to collect data from three semesters between 2016/17 and 2018/19 academic years. The study focused on analysing each didactical implementation (their characteristics, teachers’ usage and perception) and the matching students’ results (usage, academic results and perception). Ethical questions to guarantee both students’ and teachers’ privacy was taken care of, when using the data of the participants. The former data was only used for the purposes of this study and the state of the participation was reflected anonymously, which can be observed both in the information collected for the analysis as well as in the transcripts along the text. The study included the analysis of the collected data from various sources, the interpretation of its results using several analysis techniques, and the convergence in a process of triangulation. These results, after discussed with literature, allowed to answer in the most possible complete way the four research questions. Based on them, conclusions were drawn to identify factors that may foster students’ learning and engagement. The study also contributed to the advancement of knowledge in this research area. It allowed to conclude that VISIR and this methodology can be as useful for introductory courses as for more advanced ones (dealing with this thematic) as long as teachers plan the didactical implementation according to the type of course and students’ background. Plus, this methodology based upon VISIR can be applied with high success to courses that do not have an experimental component, nor its contents are directly related to the Electricity and Electronics topic. In these courses VISIR can be used with the purpose of contextualization, providing more interesting and appealing learning environments (e.g. theoretical mathematical courses). Finally, both teachers’ perception and students’ results suggest VISIR target public seems to be the students that require more support in their learning, that is, the students still struggling with difficulties than the more proficient students

Proceedings of the Conference on Production Systems and Logistics: CPSL 2022

[no abstract available