Control and automation engineering education: Combining physical, remote and virtual labs

This paper discusses challenges and opportunities in engineering education, in particular in the area of control and automation, that have been made possible through advanced IT systems and Internet. The paper reviews different types of didactic plants that evolved hands-on and simulated labs, both local as remotely accessed, to mixed reality and virtual world labs, where student avatars are used to increase the sense of reality and promote collaboration. As experience shows that alone the use of such didactic plants is not enough to ensure success in the learning process and that their integration into e-learning environments is important, the main characteristics of Computer Supported Collaborative Environments (CSCE) are discussed and some relevant initiatives in this area are reviewed. The paper also describes an e-learning system developed by the authors, which has been successfully applied to several automation engineering courses in Brazil.