Remote Lab Experiments
Preliminary Results from an Introductory Electronic Engineering Module
George Hloupis, Georgios-Theodoros Malliaros, Ilias Stavrakas, Konstantinos Moutzouris
and Dimos Triantis
Laboratory of Electric Characterization of Materials and Electronic Devices, Department of Electronics,
Technological Educational Institute of Athens, Agiou Spyridonos, Egaleo, Athens, Greece
Keywords: Remote Lab, Remote Experiment, Engineering Education, Web-based Education.
Abstract: A case study concerning the remote lab use in introductory module for Electronic Engineering studies is
presented. During the preparation stage of a forthcoming lab session, students access remote experiments
using web browser pages for each instrument which are fully controlled and acquire data in real time.
Instead of using virtual instruments or performing only computer simulations students are able to
accumulate experiences about the forthcoming lab session and thus prepare more efficiently for it.
Preliminary research shows that there is a considerable improvement in students’ performance.
1 INTRODUCTION
Facilities of the laboratories in higher educational
institutions are generally insufficient when the
number of students is considered. Implementation of
a laboratory to meet the requirements has a very
high price. For this reason there is an increasing
tendency for the use of Remote as well as Virtual
Laboratories. The former denotes that real lab
equipment made accessible over the internet by
second being virtual simulations only performed by
dedicated software. Both types have advantages and
drawbacks but they can be adapted to a course in
order to broaden the students' perception and skills
(Jeschke et al., 2007; Jona et al., 2011).
The use of remote experiments have received
great attention during last years. Several projects
have focused on the dissemination of such online
experiments: The European LiLa project (Richter et
al., 2011), the iLabs project (Sancristobal et al.,
2010) of the MIT, the Australian LabShare project
(Lowe et al., 2008) as well as The Lab2Go project
(Zutin et al., 2010) aim at building an index of
online labs by providing infrastructures for
dedicated and specialized experiments. The use of
these infrastructures for the introductory-core (first
two semesters) level of an Engineering curriculum
may be redundant. Based on this observation the
Education Unit of Laboratory of Electric
Characterization of Materials and Electronic Devices
designs and offers a web-based remote lab providing
a set of basic remote experiments that support the
laboratory assignments of the core module
“Introduction to Electronics” at 1
st
semester. The
main factor that motivated this work was the fact
that students have been observed to lack preparation
prior to lab sessions.
In previous work the theoretical part of the
module was supported by using electronic
examinations and assessments of undergraduate
students like multiple choice tests and virtual
experiments (Tsiakas et al., 2007; Triantis et al.,
2007; Ninos et al., 2010)
The current paper presents the results of a
preliminary study from the application of remote
experiments run at the Department of Electronics
during 2012-13 fall semester.
2 DESIGN APPROACH
The proposed system based on National
Instruments’ (NI) LabVIEW and Texas some type
of remote access (usually web pages), the
Instruments’ (TI) TINA software. The architecture
based on client-server lightweight approach meaning
that all the critical (and process demanding)
elements are relying on Lab’s servers while students
277
Hloupis G., Malliaros G., Stavrakas I., Moutzouris K. and Triantis D..
Remote Lab Experiments - Preliminary Results from an Introductory Electronic Engineering Module.
DOI: 10.5220/0004415702770280
In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2013), pages 277-280
ISBN: 978-989-8565-53-2
Copyright
c
2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
access their experiments through certified web
browsers. The basic architecture of the system is
presented on Fig.1.
Figure 1: The architecture of the proposed system.
The basic elements of the design are as follows:
1) The LaBVIEW Server. The core of the system
which runs on VPN servers. Each experiment hosted
in a dedicated server which is accessed by web
browsers in predefined ports. Configuration is
straightforward using NI’s knowledge base.
Instruments controlled using the VISA interface and
acquired data are stored also locally in order to avoid
experiment termination in case of Internet failure.
2) The instruments’ remote panels. For each
instrument we design and implement a remote panel
(RP) and subsequently transform this RP to a web
page. Students access the corresponding web page
for each instrument and functioning the RP. The
LabVIEW controls and indicators were customized
to look slightly different from the real controls of the
controlled instruments. This was chosen in order to
discourage students to “memorize” the function of
each individual control instead of clearly
understanding it. Typical examples of a signal
generator and an oscilloscope are presented in Fig. 2
and Fig. 3
3) The TINA 9 remote circuits. For verification
purposes, students require to run a simulation at the
time that they perform the remote experiment. Using
TI’s TINA (which installed in their local hard disks)
they have the ability (using TINA’s internal web
browser) to collect and run the corresponding
circuit. Since TINA can run independently from RP
web pages each student can run the remote
experiment and at the same time checking the
validity of acquired values by running the
corresponding simulation.
4) The booking system. Since LabVIEW cannot
provide access to two or more users simultaneously
it
is
crucial
to
provide
single
user
access
through
an
Figure 2: Function Generator RP web page.
Figure 3: Oscilloscope RP web page.
effective booking system. This was achieved using a
simple web form which checks the available
timetable and informs the user for time-slot
availability. Each student is provided by 90min
session which is 30 min less than regular lab session.
Booking can be made only once and if the student
cannot use his session an alternate timetable is
provided after the completion (by all students) of the
remote experiment.
3 METHODS AND DETAILS
The study was performed using results from multiple
choice questions from 15 students. Initially the
students follow the experiments’ procedures using
the traditional approach by completing the
preparation steps (which includes simulations and
calculations) before enter the lab. Then each student
required answering in 10 questions regarding the
experimental procedure as well as the interpretation
of results. This was defined as Tn
pre
phase. Then,
instead of simulations, students run preliminary
remote experiments in order to perform initial
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calculations. In correspondence with Tn
pre
they
called to answer the same set of 10 questions. This
was defined Tn
post
phase.
The evaluation of possible improvement by the
use of remote experiment is examined by comparing
students’ results without (Tn
pre
) and with (Tn
post
) the
use of remote experiments. Initially, results checked
for their internal reliability by means of Cronbach’s
α value for each dataset (Cronbach, 1951; Cronbach
& Shavelson, 2004).
The possible improvement is measured by means
of Hake’s gain g (Hake, 1998) which defined as
follows:
=
−
max
−
where n: number of test
max{Tn}: test’s maximum score
Hake’s gain has been accepted as an important
measuring parameter for teaching efficiency because
as weighing the students’ improvement, the effects
from their different level of previous knowledge is
corrected (Lenaerts et. al, 2003).
An additional questionnaire was supplied to
students in order to investigate the usability and the
global satisfaction from remote lab’s use.
4 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Our preliminary results derived from two curriculum
subjects: low and high pass filters. For each subject
we perform a multiple choice test thus we present
results for tests T1 and T2.
Results for the calculation of Cronbach α are
presented in Table 1. Internal consistency of results
can be characterized as accepted since all α > 0.7
(Cortina, 1993). In all cases the results follow
normal distribution according to Kolmogorov-
Smirnov test (Stuart et. al, 1999).
Table 1: Cronbach’s α results for both tests.
Test phase Cronbach α
T1
p
re
0.862
T1
p
os
t
0.809
T2
pr
e
0.779
T2
p
os
t
0.721
In Table 2 we present the results from all the
students per question as well as the improvement
according to Hake’s g. The average number of
students that gave correct answers per question
increased from 21% to 50% for Test1 and from 31%
to 53% for Test2. These correspond to Hake’s
improvement 0.37 and 0.33 correspondingly.
Table 2: Successful results per question (Q) for two
experiments (T1 & T2).
Q T1
p
re
T1
p
os
t
g T2
p
re
T2
p
os
t
g
1
s
t
4 9 0.45 6 10 0.44
2
n
d
3 10 0.58 4 8 0.36
3
r
d
1 7 0.43 5 8 0.30
4
th
4 10 0.55 2 6 0.31
5
th
0 6 0.40 1 6 0.36
6
th
5 6 0.10 7 10 0.38
7
th
2 4 0.15 5 9 0.40
8
th
3 6 0.25 5 7 0.20
9
th
4 8 0.36 5 8 0.30
10
t
h
5 9 0.40 6 8 0.22
Average
per Q
3.1 7.5 0.37 4.6 8 0.33
Results indicate that by using remote lab
experiments, students were able to improve their
performance. The improvement is quite similar
between the two tests.
Students’ perception toward the remote lab
indicated a positive evaluation from students.
Usability and overall achievement level earned
higher scores in contrast with global satisfaction
which earns controversial scores (very high and very
low). Results are presented in Fig.4
Figure 4: Student survey results: System’s Usability (blue
bar), Students’ opinion on contribution of the Remote Lab
to overall achievement level (red bar) and global
satisfaction from the complete system (green bar).
Subsequent conversations clarified the latter
aspect as a result from the students that graduated
from General High schools (as opposite to
Vocational High School graduates who had lab
experience). Students that didn’t have previous
experience with physical instruments present a lack
of understanding the potential benefits of the remote
lab than actually using the real instrumentation.
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Very High High Average Low Very Low
Number of Students
RemoteLabExperiments-PreliminaryResultsfromanIntroductoryElectronicEngineeringModule
279
5 CONCLUSIONS
The current paper presents preliminary results of
case study from the use of a remote lab in an
introductory course in Department of Electronics at
TEI of Athens. Using the National Instruments’
LabVIEW and Texas Instruments’ TINA we
implement a web-based system for remote lab
capable of providing experiments using real
instruments. Students use their web browsers to
control and collect data from real instruments while
they have the ability to run simulations on the
measured circuit using TINA’s web offered circuits.
Preliminary results using multiple choice
questions are presented in order to investigate if and
how the use of remote experiments benefits
students’ perception. Using Hake’s g measure we
estimated that initially there is an improvement in
performance which of course is a subject for future
work.
Finally a non-measurable parameter that is
observed to benefit from the application of remote
lab is the time that each instructor consumes in order
to introduce and explain each experiment. There was
a drastic decrease in time spent by the instructors for
the students that used the remote lab. This fact can
lead to disperse instructors’ time to more
personalized sessions with students that show lack of
performance.
Future research will focus on the applicability of
the proposed system to advanced courses as well as
to the elimination of operational drawbacks (e.g.
automatic selection of optimum timeslots, booking
changes, elimination of overbooking e.t.c)
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