Integrating instructional technology methodologies in a state of the art industrial control laboratory

Recent observations confirm the escalating concern of the general engineering educational community about enhancing the teaching of traditional control theory courses. The objective of this project is to improve the learning experience in a new industrial control laboratory using the latest techniques in instructional technology by incorporating newly developed software tools in order to better deliver, not only the mathematical foundation, but also to enhance the important relationship of the interdisciplinary nature of a typical introductory control course in engineering. At the University of South Florida, Department of Electrical Engineering, an effort is under way to develop a set of control laboratory experiments in a Web-managed environment to introduce the students to techniques needed for the design and implementation of automatic industrial control systems. The conclusions and future work section estimate the impact of the innovations on the student, teacher and department