Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Virtual Remote Education'

This thesis contributes to the general body of knowledge of research into engineering education. The main scope of the thesis is on enhancing laboratory education. There are three main types of laboratory: virtual, hands-on and remote. The hands-on lab is the oldest and most commonly used medium for experiential education in undergraduate degrees of science and engineering. The literature review of laboratory education has shown that hands-on labs suffer from many disadvantages, which can be overcome by utilizing hybrid laboratory structures that incorporate virtual and/or remote modes. The investigation into enhanced laboratory education is achieved via implementing new technical and pedagogical models of conducting laboratories. The technical model incorporates three access modes (virtual, hands-on and remote) to the laboratory experience in one software package called the TriLab. The TriLab concept has been applied to the Process Control Lab at the Chemical Engineering Department of Loughborough University and has been implemented using LabVIEW. The Joomla web content management system was used to develop an online portal for disseminating the remote component of the TriLab resulting in the first remote lab portal of Loughborough University and one of the few available in the UK. A pedagogical model of laboratory education based on Kolb's experiential learning theory and by the utilization of the TriLab concept is proposed. The model is built on a hypothesis, which states that the poor learning outcomes of hands-on laboratory sessions can be associated with poor activation of the stages of Kolb's experiential learning cycle. It has been proposed that access to a virtual lab in a preparatory session will play a role in activating the stages of Kolb's cycle. To verify this, educational experimentation procedures were designed and applied to two groups, control and experimental. Measurements via pre- and post-lab tests, marks for the laboratory report and the final exam of the module have been performed. The statistical analysis of the measurements has supported the stated hypothesis and solution proposal. The proposed pedagogical model is one of the few that provide a way of conducting laboratory education based on constructivist educational theories. (Continues...).

Les travaux pratiques représentent une composante incontournable de l'apprentissage. Toutefois, leur mise en œuvre au sein de laboratoires physiques requiert des infrastructures souvent coûteuses pour les institutions de formation qui peuvent ainsi difficilement faire face à la forte augmentation du nombre d'étudiants. Dans ce contexte, les laboratoires virtuels et distants (VRL) représentent une alternative pour assurer le passage à l'échelle des activités pratiques à moindre coût. De nombreux travaux de recherche ont émergé au cours de la dernière décennie en se focalisant sur les problématiques techniques et technologiques induites par ces nouveaux usages, telles que la fédération, la standardisation, ou la mutualisation des ressources de laboratoires. Cependant, les récentes revues de littérature du domaine mettent en exergue la nécessité de se préoccuper davantage des facettes pédagogiques liées à ces environnements informatiques innovants dédiés à l'apprentissage pratique. Dans cet objectif, nos travaux exploitent les traces issues des activités réalisées par les apprenants lors de sessions d'apprentissage pratique pour mettre en œuvre les théories socio-constructivistes qui sont au cœur de l'apprentissage exploratoire, et ainsi favoriser l'engagement et le processus de réflexion des étudiants. À partir de la littérature traitant des relations sociales entre apprenants, nous identifions dans un premier temps un ensemble de critères pour la conception de systèmes d'apprentissage pratique engageants. En s'appuyant sur une architecture de cloud computing, nous avons ensuite réalisé Lab4CE, un environnement web pour l'enseignement de l'Informatique capable de masquer la complexité des tâches de gestion des laboratoires, mais surtout d'exposer des capacités éducatives avancées. En effet, Lab4CE repose sur les Learning Analytics pour supporter différentes formes d'apprentissage telles que la collaboration, la coopération ou l'entraide entre pairs, mais également pour fournir des outils d'awareness et de réflexion visant à promouvoir l'apprentissage en profondeur pendant et après les activités pratiques. Plusieurs expérimentations en contexte d'apprentissage réel et présentiel montrent une évaluation positive de Lab4CE par les apprenants en terme d'utilisabilité, qu'ils s'appuient de manière significative sur nos outils d'awareness et de réflexion, mais que des artefacts supplémentaires sont nécessaires pour accroître leur engagement spontané dans des interactions sociales d'apprentissage. De plus, ces expérimentations soulignent l'existence d'une corrélation significative entre l'engagement des étudiants dans la plateforme et les stratégies d'apprentissage qu'ils mettent en œuvre d'une part, et leur performance académique d'autre part. Ces premiers résultats nous permettent d'affirmer que les théories socio-constructivistes sont un levier à l'engagement et à la réflexion dans les VRL. Ils nous invitent à confronter notre approche à d'autres modalités d'apprentissage, mais aussi à intégrer de nouvelles sources d'informations pour approfondir nos analyses du comportement et ainsi renforcer nos contributions à une meilleure prise en compte de l'apprentissage pratique dans les EIAH<br>Practical activities, used in exploratory learning, represent a major component of education: they make learners acquire not only knowledge, but also skills and attitude, and they help them bridging the gap between theories and the real world within they are applied. However, the physical laboratories hosting these activities rely on expensive infrastructures that make very difficult for institutions to cope with the high increase of the students' population. Within this context, virtual and remote laboratories (VRL) bring an affordable alternative to provide practical activities at scale. Numerous research works have come up for the last decade; they mainly focused on technological issues such as the federation of remote laboratories, their standardization, or the pooling of the resources they provide. Nevertheless, the recent literature reviews highlight the need to pay more attention to the educational facets of these innovative learning environments. With that purpose in mind, our works make use of the learners' traces collected through their practical learning sessions to sustain socio-constructivist theories, on which practical activities rely on, and thus to engage students in their learning tasks and further their reflection. Starting from the study of scientific research, we identify as a first step a set of criteria required to design practical learning systems that support social interactions between learners. We then developed Lab4CE, a web-based environment for Computer Science education. This environment relies on a cloud computing architecture to provide learners with their own virtual resources, and hides the complexity of the inherent management tasks while offering advanced educational capabilities. Indeed, Lab4CE builds on learning analytics to enable different forms of learning such as collaboration, cooperation, or peer assistance, but also to supply learners as well as teachers awareness and reflection tools that aim at promoting deep learning during and after practical activities. We carried out several experimentations in authentic and hands-on learning contexts. They stressed the fact that learners evaluate positively the usability of Lab4CE, and they significantly rely on our awareness and reflection tools. However, extra artifacts are required to increase their spontaneous engagement in social learning interactions. Moreover, theses experimentations suggested a significant correlation between, on the one hand, student's activity in the environment and the learning strategies they apply and, on the other hand, their academic performance. These first results allow us to assess that socio-constructivist theories leverage engagement and reflection within VRL. They also invite us to put our approach into practice in other learning settings, but also to extend the sources of information to deal with our behavioral analyses in depth, and thus to enhance our contributions regarding the adoption of practical learning within technological environments

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:22:32Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2011-05-24Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T19:08:05Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 ortega_a_me_ilha.pdf: 6144730 bytes, checksum: 1624729d424ab4361470744afb25a05e (MD5)<br>Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)<br>Este trabalho apresenta um portal de educação à distância que integra várias funcionalidades direcionadas ao aperfeiçoamento do ensino de Engenharia Elétrica. Possui ambiente para videoconferência, acesso a webcam robótica e demais recursos tradicionalmente utilizados em aplicações similares bastante difundidas. Destaca-se a concepção e implantação de um Laboratório de Qualidade de Energia para acesso remoto via Internet, LRQEE. O Laboratório dispõe de vários recursos visando-se flexibilidade e agilidade na integração entre diferentes instituições de ensino. Contribui, assim, para a evolução do aprendizado e racionalização de recursos financeiros, evitando-se duplicidade de equipamentos, sobretudo aqueles mais específicos e de maior custo. Permite acesso a diversos equipamentos, como fontes harmônicas programáveis, sistemas de aquisição de dados, sensores e configuração e acionamento de cargas elétricas. Todos os procedimentos são realizados remotamente sob uma interface gráfica amigável constituindo-se, assim, um importante instrumento para apoio ao ensino colaborativo, com práticas experimentais realizadas à distância, visando consolidar o aprendizado<br>This work presents a distance learning portal that integrates several functionalities addressed to the improvement of the teaching of Electric Engineering. It possesses a video conference environment, access to a robotics webcam and other resources traditionally used in widespread similar applications. It can be stands out the conception and implantation of a Laboratory of Quality of Energy for remote access through Internet, LRQEE. The Laboratory has several resources aiming the flexibility and agility in the integration among different teaching institutions. It contributes, therefore, for the evolution of the learning and rationalization of financial resources, avoiding duplicity of equipments, mainly the more specific ones and of greater cost. It allows access to several equipments, such as programmable harmonic sources, data acquisition systems, sensors and configuration and electric loads drive. All of the procedures are carried out remotely under a friendly graphic interface performing an important instrument for supporting the teaching, seeking to consolidate the learning

Este trabalho apresenta o desenvolvimento de um sistema de aquisição de dados para controlar experimentos em instrumentos de medidas através da interface GPIB. O sistema criado tem objetivos educacionais e foi integrado a um ambiente de educação a distância, permitindo o acesso remoto a instrumentos reais para que possam ser utilizados em cursos on-line. Foi utilizado um sistema de gerenciamento de cursos on-line com ferramentas interativas e de fácil gerenciamento. O sistema escolhido permite a criação de cursos de forma modular, onde os componentes ou recursos de interação são escolhidos individualmente para cada ambiente novo criado. O objetivo deste trabalho foi a criação de um novo módulo para o sistema, que representa um laboratório remoto para realização de experimentos de aquisição de dados em instrumentos. Foi proposta uma arquitetura modular para laboratório remoto baseado em tecnologias de software livre, juntamente com a tecnologia de Web Services para integração entre o sistema de aquisição e o ambiente de educação a distância. Este trabalho oferece uma nova abordagem para instrumentação remota, fornecendo não apenas a extensão de um laboratório através da Internet e de sistemas distribuídos, mas também ferramentas interativas de educação a distância, favorecendo a interação e a comunicação entre usuários.<br>This work presents the development of a data acquisition system to control experiments in measurement instruments through GPIB interface. The system created is intended to be applied for educational purposes, thus it was integrated to an online learning environment, enabling remote access to real instruments, to be used in e-learning courses. It was used an open source environment with interactive tools and easy management. Chose system allows modular e-learning courses creation, which learning components or interactive resources can be selected independently. The aim was to create a new module, representing a remote laboratory, to perform data acquisition experiments in instruments. It was proposed a modular architecture to remote laboratory based on open source technologies. It includes Web Services architecture to integrate data acquisition system and distance education environment. This research presents a differential approach for remote instrumentation. It represents not only an internet extension for laboratory, but also offer distance education interactive resources to improve user communication.