IT-Enhanced Laboratory Experience within a Modern Undergraduate Engineering Curriculum
Aziz, E.-S., Esche, S. K. & Chassapis, C.
Proceedings of the International Conference on Engineering Education 2007, Coimbra, Portugal, September 3-7, 2007.
Abstract
The emergence of information technology is enabling engineering educators to constantly reconsider both the content and means of delivery of modern undergraduate curricula.
Online learning environments are rapidly becoming viable options for providing students with a bridge from theoretical concepts to practical engineering applications.
They can be made to represent repositories of integrated tools that provide a delivery mechanism for rich learning content, advanced assessment capabilities as well as affordable access to a wide range of other resources.
Online educational environments have been used at Stevens Institute of Technology to provide undergraduate engineering students with a comprehensive laboratory experience based on content-rich and flexible remote and virtual laboratory experiments.
This paper presents an effort to design, implement and evaluate an integrated system for delivering online laboratories (i.e. remote experiments based on actual physical devices and/or virtual experiments representing pure software simulations).
The methods and software modules implemented and the pedagogical approach developed for integrating them into a comprehensive student laboratory experience have been used in a sophomore-level core undergraduate course on solid mechanics taken by all undergraduate engineering majors at SIT as well as in a junior-level course on mechanisms and machine dynamics for mechanical engineering majors.