Abstract
Engineering education requires a rather difficult learning process, which aims at building the student's capacities in theoretical insights in science, project-oriented thinking and co-operation, experimental verification of basic concepts in specific labs, deductive and creative thinking, and multi-disciplinary engineering. Many education techniques to help in that learning process have been proposed in literature and have found their way into the daily learning process. Two very prominent active learning techniques used in engineering education are on one hand the virtual and remote laboratories and on the other hand the fab labs. The upcoming internet of things paradigm is now adding new possibilities to further enhance those two techniques to support engineering education. In this chapter, the authors introduce some of those possibilities, describe use cases, and draw some conclusions on the current state of research.
TopIntroduction
Academic education programs in engineering are very challenging due to the need to strive at the same time to a sufficiently deep knowledge in theoretical principles of science, technology and mathematics, while the practical concepts and applications should be harnessed up to the level of physical implementations. This requires the educational program to go beyond classic lab-experiments and classic oral sessions in which basic theoretical principles are demonstrated and analytically explained.
As such a lot of research has been done during the last decades in order to implement educational concepts that help to build the student’s capacities in scientific thinking, deductive and creative thinking, project oriented handling, co-operation in group tasks, multi-disciplinary engineering, makers-attitude and a business-oriented attitude.
One of the methods developed to improve educational performance which is broadly applicable to many educational domains is active learning. Active learning is a method that impacts the learning process on the level of knowledge, skills and attitudes. By actively involving the students in the learning process it is possible to increase students’ abilities on the level of knowledge registration, knowledge absorption and knowledge creation. It also has the potential to increase their capacity to develop practical and methodological skills and to enhance students (lifelong) learning, entrepreneurial, social and professional attitude. The method was first introduced to enhance the effects and experience of classic oral classes at university level. An overview of multiple active learning techniques and their assessment can be found in the work of Benjamin et al. (2017). In the following table a summary of those techniques is given as an informative overview for the reader to get acquainted with those techniques.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Remote Lab: A remote laboratory or remote lab is a physical laboratory-system in which telecommunications, electronic sensors and actuators are used to perform the experiments on that laboratory-system from a distant place.
Cloud Computing: Cloud computing is a method to provide computing, storage and connection resources on demand. The client does not need any knowledge on how to service a server-platform to use the demanded resources.
Hedonics: Hedonism is a theory that puts a relation between pleasure and duty.
Digital Twin: A digital twin is a digital replica of a physical object. The digital twin has similar dynamic and time-variant behavior as the physical object.
Virtual Lab: A virtual Lab is a simulated lab environment typically implemented as a software program which allows the users to perform their experiments.
Edge Computing: Edge computing is a distributed computing paradigm in which the computing resources are located closer to the place where those resources are needed and used.
Fab Lab: A fabrication lab or fab lab is a workshop which typically contains a set of (low cost) machines for digital fabrication of prototypes.
Active Learning: Active learning is a method that impacts the learning process on the level of knowledge, skills and attitudes. By actively involving the students in the learning process it is possible to increase students’ abilities on the level of knowledge registration, knowledge absorption and knowledge creation.