Academic effectiveness of VISIR remote lab in analog electronics

The effectiveness of VISIR is compared to other experimentation activities under the point of view presented by the professor Soysal in 2000. Advantages and limitations are discussed in terms of equipment availability, infrastructure cost, and contribution to various elements of experimental learning

Experiences with remote laboratories

The paper reports on experiences of academics and students involved in using remote engineering laboratories both when students work individually or collaboratively with others on the experiments. Positives and negatives are highlighted and are contrasted with expectations of what the remote laboratories can bring into pedagogical environments. Recommendations and conclusions follow on how to better use the remote laboratories in teaching

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

Combined efforts to develop students experimental competences

Students experimental competences are of most importance in engineering courses. However in post-Bologna courses, the number of contact hours and the actual extent of hands-on lab work were substantially reduced. Online resources usage (simulators and remote labs) has been growing up in the last decades, as more complex and versatile tools are being developed. Unfortunately, several of these usages reported in literature do not show the didactical backing that support these implementations. This work is a step forward, explaining how a teacher implemented a combination of online resources in order to develop experimental competences. The results show significant correlations between students’ usage of these resources and their calculus competences and final achievements.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Using UML Models to Describe the VISIR System

Analysis and design are important phases in the system development lifecycle. In these phases, developers record information necessary for properly understanding the nature of the systems under consideration. We consider a particular type of system, named Remote Lab that allows both teachers and students to perform real ex- periments over the internet and we focus on Virtual Instru- ment Systems in Reality (VISIR). We describe a summarized web interface of VISIR using the Unified Modeling Language (UML). Our case study aims at identifying the requirements of VISIR and at creating a set of UML diagrams that succinctly provide enough infor- mation to both developers and users so that they acquire enough information for building a general understanding of it. Additionally, we provide elements for extending UML to better support further user interface development in VISIR.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

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

The use of remote labs to contextualize learning and teaching in engineering mathematics

Interdisciplinary education is an important aspect of critical thinking development in engineering students, as they prepare for their careers. This study reports the didactic experiences of the integration of remote experiment, simulations and calculations for learning and teaching higher education mathematics. These are the first experiences of the use of the remote electronics laboratory VISIR (Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality) in a didactic implementation in the engineering subjects of Calculus and Statistics. The strategy used in Calculus is to study a real electric circuit modeled by differential equations, covering 20% of the topics in the syllabus. In statistics, real experiments are used to collect, organise and interpret data, covering around 40% of the syllabus. The results show that students who benefited from this implementation not only feel more engaged and interested in engineering mathematics, but are also likely to develop new skills and achieve higher in mathematics subjects.N/

VISIR SYSTEM @ DEUSTO, BTH, ISEP, and UNED institutes: Assisting and supporting a hands-on laboratories to serve higher education students

Practical study is considered a backbone of qualification in engineering and sciences education. It helps to understand the theoretical concepts for university students. Over the last decades, limitation of available lab has become one of encumbrances to some universities and institutions owing to the cost and unavailability of instructors. It led to decline the students’ qualifications in experimentation in engineering and sciences fields. Today, several ideas have implemented to get over the limitation of lab, for example online labs technology, which is refers to “Remote and Virtual Labs”. This technology is become available over Internet, for instance Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality (VISIR). In addition, online labs are proven that they can assist hands-on laboratories and may become the best technology for supporting hands-on ones, regarding to its low cost and ubiquity. This paper presents the number of students (access and users access) who are involved to use VISIR nodes that located at BTH, Deusto, ISEP, and UNED institutions. The filtration that used in this study is to categorize yearly and monthly access of students from those VISIR nodes.N/

Why visir? Proliferative activities and collaborative work of visir system

Online laboratories have been increasingly deployed in several universities and institutions around the world. Besides helping to leverage a number of educational developments, they enable teachers and researchers to share their knowledge across institutional boundaries. It has been observed that online laboratories have a positive effect on students' skills acquisition because they promote collaborative work and allow students to perform physical experiments remotely usually 24/7. Today, one can find a wide range of online laboratories in the literature that are supporting many subjects in different engineering and sciences fields, especially in electric and electronic engineering. One such system is VISIR (Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality). VISIR plays an important role in electrical and electronic engineering education by allowing both teachers and students to conduct real experiments with electric and electronic circuits, via the Internet. It also complements hands-on laboratories by serving thousands of students globally, as a result of being spread by several universities and institutes worldwide. Presently, VISIR is installed in eight higher education institutions), in six different countries (Austria, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, India, and Georgia), and is the first remote lab in the world supporting a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). In addition, a number of experiments in VISIR can be freely accessed, using the guest user mode, depending on the institutions available resources. In this study, we have used the data collection method focused on all scholarly papers that are related to the VISIR system, which allowed collecting references from many resources such as conference proceedings, book chapters, and journals. The objective of the paper is to illustrate the researches activities, developments, and studies that contributed to making of VISIR the best remote controlled laboratory in the world, according to the GOLC (Global Online Laboratory Consortium). Our research included the following dimensions: a) courses and subjects that include experiments done in VISIR, from different universities and institutes; b) the number of scholarly papers and authors related to VISIR, with a reference to the publishing sources; c) the different technologies used to deliver the laboratory experiments; d) the total number (and its evolution) of users who have accessed the several VISIR nodes; e) finally, the collaborative work resulting from the use and share of the VISIR system. To conclude, the paper discusses the impact of VISIR in the role of the laboratory in undergraduate engineering education, in particular in electrical and electronic engineering, and its contribution to the collaborative work observed among the academic staff, researchers and students who used it.N/

Science Education at High School: a VISIR Remote Lab Implementation

Experimentation is crucial in science teaching at any education level. Students’ motivation and collaborative work are also essential in order to achieve positive learning outcomes. This article portrays the implementation of remote experimentation using VISIR in a Physics subject at high-school level. Qualitative and quantitative data were analyzed for this particular case study in order to shed light on the influence of VISIR on students’ motivation. Results showed that VISIR remote lab is a powerful tool to arouse interest in electronic circuit topics.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio