The impact of online laboratory to student learning

Abstract

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 [1] and the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers [2]. Traditionally, workshop trainings were conducted in a physical laboratory with real instruments such as oscilloscopes, multimeters, regulated supplies and signal generators. There have been limitations on traditional workshop trainings, in terms of space, staff and material resources. This is particularly true when students wish to access the laboratory experiment out of the normal classroom hours. 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 pedagogies will be studied. Virtual Workshop has a few competitive advantages and shortcomings over traditional workshops in addressing this challenge [3]. 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.