AC 2011-914: USING VIRTUAL AND REMOTE LABORATORY TO EN- HANCE ENGINEERING TECHNOLOGY EDUCATION

Enhancement of teaching, laboratory and human development by virtual and remote laboratory designs cannot be over-emphasized. In this paper, progress made in the development of a Virtual and Remote Laboratory (VR-Lab) for Engineering Technology is presented. Authors have used prevalent technology to develop new Virtual and Remote Labs for Direct Current and Data Communications experiments. The VR-Lab system framework, interfacing and facilities are also presented. Gains of positive outcomes on inter-university cooperation, and student development are reported. Reactions from student users through experiment performances and surveys were gauged and used in perfecting the VR-Lab designs. The effect on curriculum development is considered. Introduction Information technology has had a great impact on education, by providing additional teaching strategies such as online learning. The 2009 Sloan Survey of Online Learning revealed that online learning enrollment rose by nearly 17 percent from the previous year. This survey of more than 2,500 colleges and universities in United States found that approximately 4.6 million students were enrolled in at least one online course in the Fall semester of 2008.To provide such online courses, the online laboratories are inevitably necessary, especially for the engineering and technology education. In general, the online laboratories can be categorized in virtual laboratory and remote laboratory 3, 4, 5, . The virtual laboratory is based on software such as LabVIEW (short for Laboratory Virtual Instrumentation Engineering Workbench), Matlab/Simulink, Java Applet, Flash or other software to simulate the lab environment. Remote experiments use real components or instrumentation at a different location from where they are controlled or conducted. An example of such remote experiments is a model bridge experiment that was conducted and controlled through the Internet or an Intranet. Compared to traditional hands-on experiments, experiments operated remotely over the Internet offer many advantages. One of these benefits is the ability to handle a large number of students to conduct experiments through scheduling. The remote laboratory allows a workaround for complex logistics, such as staff, space, scheduling, budget, and commuting. Texas Southern University (TSU) is one of the two comprehensive Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) with more than 9,500 undergraduates and African Americans constitute about 85% of its undergraduate enrollment. The Department of Engineering Technology at TSU offers a Bachelor of Science degree in Electronic Engineering Technology (ELET), Computer Engineering Technology (CMET) and Civil Engineering Technology (CIVT). Over 200 students are currently enrolled in the department. The student population is comprised of about 76% African-Americans, and about 21% Hispanics. Female students constitute 31% of the overall student population in the department. In order to strengthen the retention of recruited students, and in order to enhance the quality of our instructional effort, we successfully secured the NSF HBCU-UP Targeted Infusion Grant. This grant has facilitated the conduct of a proposed project to be entitled “Development of Virtual and Remote Laboratory for Engineering Technology Undergraduate Students”. A state of the art Virtual and Remote Laboratory (VR-Lab) has been built with partial support from this grant. In this paper, the project research activities are reported. The student survey results are analyzed and presented. Virtual and Remote Laboratory Framework The developed VR-Lab framework is shown in Figure 1. There are two major components in the developed remote laboratory: the scheduler web server and the Remote Experiment Engine (REE). The Scheduler Web Server (SWS) joins a physical laboratory experiment with an Internet end-user by providing account management, authentication as well as users and experiments scheduling. Currently, an entry level web server suffices for the purpose of managing 10 or more classrooms with a continuous use of the related remote experiments. The SWS is written using a combination of open source languages such as PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) and JavaScript, and hosted on a Linux operating system. The REE allows the experiment to exchange data with the SWS.