VIRTUAL WORKSHOP FOR MODERN INDUSTRIAL TRAINING

摘要

Workshop training has been a mandatory curriculum requirement for academic accreditation of many engineering professional bodies such as the Engineering Council of the United Kingdom and the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers. Traditionally, workshop trainings were conducted in a physical laboratory with real instruments such as oscilloscopes, multimeters, regulated supplies and signal generators. Recently, virtual workshop and virtual instrumentation has been introduced to the workshop training for engineering education. Students are no longer required to conduct laboratories in physical laboratories. Instead, they can just sit in front of their laptops and conduct the experiments and workshops in a more "effective" way. In this paper, the impacts of these emerging learning technologies to traditional engineering education and its pedagogics will be studied. On the other hand, advancing personalized learning had been identified by the National Academy of Engineering as one of the fourteen Grand Challenges for Engineering in the 21st century. Virtual Workshop has a few competitive advantages and shortcomings over traditional workshops in addressing this challenge. The training requirements for engineering students are always evolving. Though there are some insufficiencies in virtual workshop training but it can also address some challenging demands for collaboration and individuality in engineering education for the modern industry, economy and society.