Internet of Things: Opportunities for Vocational

Education and Training

Presentation of the Pilot Project

Juha Vihervaara and Teemu Alapaholuoma

Pori Campus, Tampere University of Technology, Pohjoisranta 11, 28100 Pori, Finland

Keywords: Vocational Education, Internet of Things, Pilot.

Abstract: In the Internet of Things (IoT), machines and devices are equipped with sensors and Internet connections that

makes it possible to collect data and store this data to cloud services. In vocational education and training, the

stored data can be used to improve decision-making processes. With the help of this data, a teacher can also

get a more accurate picture of the current state of the education environment than before. IoT should be

integrated into vocational education and training because IoT will help to achieve important educational

objectives. IoT is able to promote students' preparation for working life, the safety of education environment,

self-directed learning, and effective learning. It can also improve the efficient use of educational resources.

In additional, IoT based solutions should be introduced so that students would have a vision of new types of

IoT skill requirements before they enter the labour market. In this paper, we presents IoT related aspects that

enable to meet the above-mentioned educational objectives. By implementing a pilot project, we aim to

concretise IoT’s possibilities in the education sector.

1 INTRODUCTION

The Internet of Things (IoT) (Whitmore et al. 2014)

allows enhanced interaction between the physical

world and computer-based systems. It makes possible

for devices, machines, people and other types of

physical objects to collect data and transmit this data

to cloud services. This data can be utilized in

decision-making processes to improve accuracy and

efficiency. It also makes sense to integrate IoT more

closely into vocational education and training

because IoT will help to achieve the important

objectives of vocational education. IoT is able to

promote students' preparation for working life, the

safety of education environment, self-directed

learning, and effective learning. It can also improve

the efficient use of educational resources.

Working life is going to be even more technical in

the future when IoT connects physical machines and

devices to the digital world. This means that machines

and devices are equipped with sensors that send state

information to the data warehouses of cloud services

over the Internet. This will change working life and

place new demands on employees' know-how.

Education should prepare future employees for these

changes. These changes should also be taken into

account in curriculums. Above all, vocational

education and training should introduce IoT based

solutions so that students would have a vision of new

types of IoT skill requirements before they enter the

labour market.

A safe school environment is an important issue

for students to make them feel safe (Young et al.

2016). However, there are some physical school

environments, especially in vocational education,

which set a number of challenges for a safe

schoolwork. There are often machines and equipment

whose correct and safe use can be challenging for

novice users. Therefore, it is important to ensure that

students can use these machines and equipment in a

safe and skilled way so that any kinds of physical

hazards can be avoided. New instruction and

oversight methods are always welcome to better

prepare new and young workers to occupational

safety. The results of the studies show that the young

participating in the labour market often have a higher

incidence of accidents and other negative work

effects then the workforce in general (Andersson et

al. 2014; Laberge et al. 2014; Schulte et al. 2005).

In recent years, there has been a growing interest

in self-directed learning (SDL). SDL promotes the

476

Vihervaara, J. and Alapaholuoma, T.

Internet of Things: Opportunities for Vocational Education and Training - Presentation of the Pilot Project.

DOI: 10.5220/0006353204760480

In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2017) - Volume 1, pages 476-480

ISBN: 978-989-758-239-4

role of the learner. The aim of SDL is that learning

happens when the individual learner takes ownership

for his own learning. It is important to cerate the

learning environment where SDL can concretise in a

proper way. For self-directed learning, there must be

tools to keep students on the right learning path.

Feedback is among the most important features of

SDL (Embo 2010). Students need feedback on the

development of their professional skills.

So, self-directed learning creates new challenging

requirements for learning technologies. Teo et al.

(2010) mentioned that technology may have direct

impact on self-directed learning because it has greatly

facilitated access both to information resources and to

online expertises. Related to self-directed learning,

being able to access a wide and unlimited range of

information to serve learning needs and interests are

important for students. This includes capturing,

storing, manipulating and displaying information as

well as making contact with fellow learners and

experts around the world. Jossberger et al. (2010)

noted that educational environments should be

adaptive to the learners' needs to achieve individual

learning. Furthermore, teachers should support

learners to become competent in the domain but also

guide them to become self‐directed learners. The

interaction between the student, teacher, and

environment is important.

New technical solutions are always welcome to

improve educational outcomes. Nowadays in

vocational education, teachers can use a wide range

of multi technical resources to enhance learning. For

example, simulators and video-based approaches can

be utilized. However, these technical resources must

be able to combine to an integrated adaptable solution

in order to promote effective learning. Lowman

(1996) expended the scope of effective teaching by

defining it as the process of selecting the materials,

resources, teaching strategies, and assignments that

have the greatest potential to contribute to student

learning.

Theall (1999) viewed effective teaching as a

complex, multidimensional, and dynamic process

affected by the individuals who involved in the

process as well as by the circumstances in the

classroom. IoT is a tool that, in many cases, enables

to integrate various technical tools to a workable

educational entity. Mohd (2016) mentioned that

students in vocational education viewed their

instructor as an effective educator when they are

accessible, fair in testing and grading, technology

competent, and manage class time. IoT can promote

education with respect to all these factors.

In Section 2, we bring out IoT related things that

enable to meet the above-mentioned challenges.

Section 3 introduces our pilot project related to the

IoT opportunities in education. Section 4 concludes

the paper.

2 IoT IN VOCATIONAL

EDUCATION

Due to IoT the information and communication

technology (ICT) penetrates deeper into vocational

education and training. ICT spreads to places where

it has not been utilized on a large scale in the past.

Trough IoT, the physical and digital world are linked

more closely to each other. Machines and things

equipped with sensors represent the physical world.

The digital world includes cloud services, data

analytics, intelligent algorithms, and user terminals.

The digital world also includes software-based

intelligent services and user friendly interfaces built

on top of the above-mentioned components.

IoT enables that data can flow from the physical

world to the digital world through data networks.

With the help of this data, a person can get a more

accurate picture of the current state of machines and

systems. As a result, control operations and decision-

making processes will become more data-driven

because the collected data enables fast and clever

conclusions for control functions. In addition, the

actions of control functions can be executed more

quickly because data can also be transmitted from the

digital world to the actuators of the physical world in

the form of control commands. IoT will make the

machines and services of vocational education more

intelligent in the future. Of course, it can be said that

IoT is already integrated into education on a small

scale (Pruet et al. 2015; Selinger et al. 2013; Wang

2010).

2.1 Students' Preparation for Working

Life

Many countries and companies have identified IoT as

one of the key factors when trying to guarantee the

future competitiveness of the industry. Vocational

education institutions play a key role in these

competitiveness strategies because these institutions

educate future workers. Therefore, IoT must be

integrated into vocational education more widely.

Relating to the machinery and equipment, ICT

technology is becoming more and more a tool of

general use. Younger generations even expect that

ICT technology will facilitate working life (Jones et

Internet of Things: Opportunities for Vocational Education and Training - Presentation of the Pilot Project

477

al. 2010). In the future, the software will play the

more important role everywhere compared to the

physical iron. A machine or a thing equipped with the

sophisticated software will observe its condition and

its environment better than before. In addition,

devices will send information to cloud services that

allows the remote monitoring of devices, and even the

remote use of devices. Remote monitoring has been

commonplace at least the past twenty years.

However, IoT is changing remote monitoring because

cloud services and data analytics come into play

(Mohammed et al. 2014). These changes set new

requirements for future employees.

2.2 Safe Education Environment

ICT and IoT solutions often improve the safety of

working environment (Carbonari et al. 2011). Related

to vocational education and training, the collected

data can be analysed to detect such wrong ways of

using the machine, which may create a hazardous

situation. After the findings, the student can be guided

relating to the safe work procedures. Data analytics

can be used to detect data anomalies compared to the

data representing the normal operating machine

(Wang et al. 2015). This allows predict machine

failures that can be dangerous for students. The

machine can be stopped before a hazardous situation.

The teacher can also define the students

authorized to use a specific device based on the

required skill level. The student must always log in

the device, for example, using fingerprint

authentication. Safety is also increased by the fact that

the machines equipped with the right kind of sensors

are able to recognize human limbs, and therefore,

these machines do not pose a danger to humans. On

the contrary, the intelligent machines are capable to

prevent the dangerous situations that careless people

cause themselves. For example, the machine can

automatically stop the movement of the actuator

when a dangerous situation arises.

If an accident occurs for some reason, the

collected data can be used to analyse the accident.

The course of events can be analysed afterwards, for

example, by using the stored video. The stored data

may indicate that, for example, the student has had

sufficient capacity for independent use of the device.

2.3 Self-directed Learning

IoT is able to promote the independent work of

students. Intelligent devices are able to guide the

students and give feedback to students. IoT enables

advanced remote monitoring which enables the

teacher to monitor the work of several students at the

same time. In real time, as well as afterwards, it is

possible to find out who are using a certain device.

With the help of collected data and advanced data

analytics, it is possible to evaluate how well the

students have performed with their exercise works

independently. For the reason that this evaluation

may be carried out automatically by an impartial

system, IoT is able to promote the equal treatment of

students. The collected data also enables the

automatic documentation of students’ progresses.

2.4 Efficient Use of Education

Resources

With the help of IoT, the teacher is able to see the

current state of the whole education environment

better than before. Sensors will be the extra eyes and

ears of the teacher that help to make the right

decisions at the right time. Efficiency improves when

information flows seamlessly from place to place. All

the information can be displayed in a centralized user

interface. Couple this with the results of real-time

data analytics, teachers are capable of faster and

better quality decision-making than without the help

of IoT. So, it possible to improve the quality of

teaching. IoT can offer autonomously working

solutions for teaching. Teachers will benefit from this

because they can manage better with their daily

routines. Intelligent systems assist to direct the

teaching to the right direction.

3 PILOT PROJECT

By implementing a pilot project, we aim to concretise

the above-mentioned possibilities. Figure 1 presents

the implementation solution of our pilot project. The

solution consists of three parts, which are the training

area, the cloud service, and the user interface

components of the teacher. Data flows from one part

to another over the Internet. Next, the logical

operation of the system is described and technical

implementation issues are mainly neglected.

3.1 Training Area

The training area consists of a machine, video camera

and control unit. If IoT is considered, the control unit

has an important role. In the pilot project, the control

unit is implemented using the Raspberry PI board

which is a credit card-sized single-board computer

(Raspberry Pi Foundation 2017). It is widely used in

IoT pilots.

CSEDU 2017 - 9th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

478

Figure 1: Three parts of the pilot project.

The control unit includes a user authentication unit so

that the machine can be used only by the students

having the required skills and knowledge. For

example, the power supply of the machine is not

switched on until the student’s access right is

authenticated. Such switching on can be done

wirelessly, for example, by using the Z-wave

technology (Gomez and Paradells, 2010). We use the

NFC reader for user authentication so that each

student has his own personal NFC tag. Another even

more trustworthy technique for this use would be the

fingerprint authentication. Immediately after

permitting the use of the machine, the control unit

switches on the video surveillance of the training

area.

A control unit button allows the student to send an

invitation to the teacher when the student needs

guidance. Another control unit button allows the

student to start the instruction and safety video of the

machine. With the help of this video, the student can

independently recall the issues related to the safe use

of the machine. Xeroulis et al. (2007) mentioned that

computer-based video instructions are able to serve as

a useful pedagogic adjunct for basic skills training.

3.2 Cloud Service

The system-related information is stored into the

cloud service. There are stored the instruction and

safety video, access rights and guidance requests. In

addition, all statistical data including the videos

relating to the video surveillance is stored there. All

this information not necessarily reside on the same

physical server. For example, videos may be stored

on different servers than other information.

3.3 Teacher’s Components

The user interface components offer a view of the

system data. With the help of the mobile application

and the web browser, the teacher can monitor the

training area in real-time. The guidance requests sent

by the students can also be viewed through these

components. They also offer a view of the statistical

data. For example, based on the stored data, the

teacher can examine how long each student has used

the machine. The stored videos can also be viewed

afterwards.

4 CONCLUSIONS

This paper has emphasized that IoT is capable of

improving vocational education and training in many

ways. There is also a need to integrate IoT into the

learning process because young people are

accustomed to find answers to open problems with

the help of digital devices. This paper points out that

IoT solutions are suitable for teaching the basic

technical skills and safety issues. When IoT is

incorporated into education in a reasonable way, it

can serve as a useful pedagogic adjunct for skills

training.

Companies have already taken the first steps of

IoT. It is expected that education will follow the

business with a slight delay after the IoT solutions

will stabilize and prices will fall. The changes will not

happen overnight. IoT's utilization can proceed in

small steps. The solutions implemented in a hurry and

their technical problems can be factors that can give

students a bad impression about IoT solutions. Once

the first steps have been taken, the workload of

offering it to additional devices is relatively small. In

many cases, it is possible that the manufacturer of

some technical device produces the IoT components

of that device. In addition, we have to remember that

IoT is only one tool among other tools to improve

educational activities. It cannot replace teachers but it

Internet of Things: Opportunities for Vocational Education and Training - Presentation of the Pilot Project

479

will certainly pose challenges to the teachers’

professional skills.

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