A Low-Cost Educational Remotely Controlled Solar Energy Laboratory

This paper proposes the hardware and software implementation of the system required to establish a low-cost educational remotely controlled solar energy laboratory. The system consists of two main parts, a Solar Energy System and a Remotely Controlled Laboratory. The Solar Energy System is a Photovoltaic system, which consists of multiple photovoltaic cells that convert solar radiation (sunlight) or normal lights into usable direct current (DC) electricity, and then it either charges a backup battery or uses an inverter circuit that changes direct current (DC) to alternating current (AC). The other part of the system is a Remotely Controlled Laboratory, aimed at enabling students to control solar energy experiments remotely

Assessing the Remote Engineering Lab VISIR at Al-Quds University in Palestine

Engineering labs play a vital role in engineering education, make science come alive, and supply students with better understanding of theories. As a result, they contribute to the improvement of their knowledge and skills. Remote labs not enable sharing of teaching resources such as devices, equipment and instrumentation between universities, but also relax time and space constraints; yet they are considered as a complementary asset to the traditional hands-on labs. This paper is concerned with a two-stage assessment of the engineering remote lab VISIR. In the first stage, the assessment investigated if the students accept to use VISIR in their future lab courses at the Faculty of Engineering at Al-Quds University in Palestine. In the second stage, a deeper analysis will be performed to compare VISIR to hands-on and simulators based on the evaluation criteria: performance, students’ retention rate and satisfaction survey.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Dual-study electrical engineering at Al-Quds University in Palestine

Dual studies was launched at Al-Quds University in 2015, which is aimed at contributing to raising the professional level of Palestinian youth, providing good job opportunities for students after graduation, as well as bridging the gap between the outputs of academic education and the needs and requirements of the Palestinian labor market. One major ingredient of Dual Studies is the Electrical Engineering program, which equips the student with both theory and practice at the same time. During the four years of studying in this program, the student spends half of his/her time in partner companies that are interested in employing electrical engineers. The full-time employment after graduation represents one of the major success indicators of DSEE that would be possible to assess when the first DSEE cohort will graduate and finish their study after two years.This is to acknowledge that the dual study electrical engineering program (DSEE) reported here is part of dual studies project at Al-Quds University (AQU). This project entitled as “More Job Opportunities for the Palestinian Youth” is supported by the German Government BMZ (Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development) through GIZ (The German Development Cooperation Agency Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH), KfW Development Bank and GFA Consulting Group GmbH. All opinions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of BMZ, GIZ, KfW, GFA, DHBW and AQU

Avaliação em Duas Fases do Laboratório Remoto em Engenharia, VISIR, na Universidade Al-Quds da Palestina

Os laboratórios de ciência e engenharia desempenham um papel fundamental na demonstração de conceitos e princípios, bem como na melhoria das competências técnicas. Com a introdução de laboratórios remotos foi possível partilhar dispositivos, equipamento e instrumentação entre universidades. Mais, eles evitam restrições de tempo e espaço, sendo capazes de se adaptar ao ritmo próprio de cada estudante, no caso do tempo passado no laboratório não ter sido suficiente. Neste artigo é descrito um estudo empírico, dividido em duas fases de avaliação. Na primeira fase foi avaliada a flexibilidade de aplicação do laboratório remoto em engenharia VISIR na faculdade de engenharia na Universidade de Al-Quds em Jerusalém, Palestina. Durante esta fase foi ainda avaliada a aceitação desta tecnologia, pelos estudantes, quando em interação com os laboratórios tradicionais. Na segunda fase deste estudo, que decor rerá em 2014/15, será realizada uma aprofundada análise comparativa de forma a caracterizar o VISIR perante as restantes modalidades de laboratórios de engenharia, os práticos/presenciais e os de simulação. Estas três formas de laboratório são comparadas através de testes experimentais, tendo em atenção os critérios de avaliação definidos para os laboratórios de ensino de engenharia e de acordo com os objetivos fundamentais dos cursos, nomeadamente, as taxas de retenção e de satisfação dos estudantes, bem como do seu desempenho.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A Two-Stage Assessment of the Remote Engineering Lab VISIR at Al-Quds University in Palestine

Engineering labs are an essential part in engineering education since they provide practical knowledge for students, illustrate concepts and principles, and improve technical skills. Remote labs allow devices, equipment and instrumentations to be shared with other universities. Additionally, they relax time and space constraints, and are capable of being adapted to the pace of each student in case there was insufficient time in the laboratory. This paper describes an empirical study, which embeds two stages of assessment. In the first stage, we are concerned with finding out the level of flexibility when applying the engineering remote lab VISIR as a contemporary remote lab technology in the engineering faculty at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem in Palestine, and whether the engineering students will accept such technology to interact with in their future lab courses or not. In the second stage of the assessment study, a more in-depth comparative analysis will be carried out in order to have a categorization of VISIR in the landscape of the engineering labs such as hands-on and simulations. The three lab approaches will be compared with each other by means of an experimental testing based on assessment criteria that are in accordance with the fundamental course objectives of engineering instructional labs: student’s retention rate and satisfaction survey, as well as their performance.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Work in Progress – Establishing a Master Program in Cyber Physical Systems: Basic Findings and Future Perspectives

© 2020 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 reports on the basic findings and future perspectives of a capacity building project funded by the European Union. The International Master of Science on Cyber Physical Systems (MS@CPS) is a collaborative project that aims to establish a master program in cyber physical systems (CPS). A consortium composed of nine partners proposed the project. Three partners are European and from Germany, UK and Sweden; while the other six partners are from the South Mediterranean region and include: Palestine, Jordan and Tunisia. The consortium is led by the University of Siegen in Germany who also manages the implementation of the work packages. CPS is an emerging engineering subject with significant economic and societal implications, which motivated the consortium to propose the establishment of a master program to offer educational and training opportunities at graduate level in the fields of CPS. In this paper, CPS as a field of study is introduced with an emphasis on its importance, especially with regard to meeting local needs. A brief description of the project is presented in conjunction with the methodology for developing the courses and their learning outcomes

A Web-Based Remote Lab Platform with Reusability for Electronic Experiments in Engineering Education

This contribution shows the concept and the steps of how we can create a Web-based remote lab platform with reusability capability that can be mainly used in engineering and science education for teaching electronics. Reusability is achieved in such a way that the platform not only allows the implementation of a variety of electronic experiments, but also it disburdens the experiment designers in their task of building the lab experiments as well. Moreover, the remote lab platform doesn't necessitate the creation of any kind of software including the user-interface

Cognitive-Compatible Human-Machine Interfaces by Combining Ecological Interface Design and Object-Oriented Programming

Most of human-machine interfaces (HMIs) for process control disseminated in the industry are mostly technique-oriented and don't reflect operators' needs. This approach tries to compensate this lack through offering user-oriented interfaces characterized as cognitive-compatible. If HMIs have to be cognitive-compatible, then designers should take various cognitive objects such as reasoning, memory and knowledge into account. The ecological interface design (EID) offers a well-founded methodology for designing HMIs because, on the one hand, the internal physical behavior of the technical system will be exposed through the interface; and, on the other, a harmonic and an effective interaction between operators and machines will be achieved. This kind of interaction is to see as the positive result of utilizing the physical and functional characteristics of the technical system as design inputs. Additionally, EID is oriented to the three human behavior levels: the skill-, rule- and knowledge-based levels known as the human-information processing. In order to obtain cognitive-compatible HMIs constructed of EID objects, a suitable means like the object-oriented programming (OOP) in combination with a powerful development tool such as the Visual Studio .NET Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is needed. As OOP is based on nouns and reflects how the real world is perceived, it disburdens developers in translating their design ideas and models into computer applications

Designing Multimodal User-Interfaces for Effective E-Learning in the School Primary Stages Applied on Real Fractions

This contribution focuses on the development and design of e-learning tools for school students in primary stages through dealing and considering the math of real fractions, which presents an example of learning material difficult to understand by many school students and a real challenge for e-learning designers and multimedia authoring. Firstly, we will highlight several problems facing school students and teachers caused by the traditional learning approach. Then, we are going to discuss some aspects related to e-learning, the major theoretical issues of educational psychology and e-learning with various modalities related to our work, and the classification of the interactive multimedia methodologies adopted in this work. Furthermore, the software-ergonomic and â??architectural features of the developed e-learning tool will be introduced. Finally, the paper will conclude with a brief summary of a usability testing carried out to compare the developed e-learning user-interface with the traditional learning approach

Evaluation Methods and Techniques for E-Learning Software for School Students in Primary Stages

This investigation is concerned with the evaluation of an e-learning program developed as an educational tool for the primary grades in real factors in mathematics. The objectives of such a mathematical program designed for school students in primary stages are to encourage them to study mathematics through introducing a lot of examples and exercises that aid them to understand the basic operations on real fraction, as well as to present and explain the subject matter in a clear and user-oriented manner through visual illustrations and alternations. The paper will highlight the advantages of introducing e-learning in schools and describe its later impact on the students' learning process in the Palestinian National Authority schools, through usability tests aimed at investigating the effect of using computerized methods on the achievement of primary grade students in mathematics, in comparison with traditional non-computerized systems of education