An Experience De-localizing a Freshman Electrical Engineering Laboratory

摘要

A summary of the activities done by the authors in order to evaluate the feasibility of the extension to de-localized teaching of experimental matters using the Internet is presented and discussed. We have considered a basic configuration: students that do their practical work at a remote bench authenticated by a laboratory server. The existence of remote benches requires us to contemplate problems related to some kind of real time supervision and validation of the work done at the remote site as well as with the communications that are necessary to demand and deliver remote assistance. These issues are usually addressed 'in-situ' in a local lab. The work at the bench is done under the immediate supervision of a local computer that also sends information to the server about the progress of the assigned work, and that is also able to communicate with an instructor using different tools developed during this work. These isolated remote benches could be aggregated to form a remote laboratory or, in general, a virtual laboratory under centralized supervision; the activity carried out at each remote bench is monitored without the need of intervention of the student. The target we had in mind when we began the experience was to evaluate the possibility of sharing expensive resources between different users. Our conclusions and suggestions are finally stated.