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Common multidisciplinary prototypes of remote laboratories in the educational curricula of electrical & computer engineering

Abstract:

On recent years, the educational paradigm of electrical and computer engineering has undergone a significant transformation with the advent and the exploitation of computer and communication technologies. Such transformation was necessitated in order to harmonize the learning process with the needs of the daily life. As a result, E-learning has been adopted and has added two major aspects to the learning process: 1) Interactivity; owing to the integration of simulation and multimedia technologies. 2) Ubiquity; owing to the integration of synchronous and asynchronous communication tools, and remote laboratories. Thereby, thanks to E-learning students incentives toward learning have increased. There is no doubt that practical sessions have an intrinsic role in electrical and computer engineering education; they augment the learning outcomes by strengthening the understanding of scientific concepts and theories. However, cost and administration burdens have hindered the adoption of practical sessions in engineering education until the appearance of remote laboratories. Remote laboratories have tackled these concerns by bringing practical sessions online and providing workbenches unconstrained by neither geographical nor time considerations. For these reasons, remote laboratories have proliferated among many universities and institutes around the world to be adopted in most of the disciplines of electrical and computer engineering curricula. A study carried out by the authors deduced that most of the developed remote laboratories around the world are based on common prototypes that are subsets of a common architecture, which is going to be the main topic of this paper. The paper reports on the common prototypes of today's remote laboratories for electrical and computer engineering education and addresses the most outstanding developments for the multidisciplinary applications that are based on such prototypes. These applications encompass embedded systems (e.g. Programmable Logic Devices (PLD) and microcontrollers), Digital Signal Processing (DSP), instrumentation and measurements, automation (e.g. Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs)), machinery control, and others. The aim of this study is to foster the dissemination of remote laboratories in the learning process with regarding to the recommendation of the Accbkp_reditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) and to foster, as well, the globalization of engineering education by pointing out the remarkable achievement in the remote experimentation field. © 2012 American Society for Engineering Education.