A Novel Approach for Laboratory Activities in E-Learning Courses

Nowadays the challenge for engineering education is about the online education: the role of laboratory is very important in engineering studies. In the past two decades great efforts have been made in this direction and many proposals of virtual and remote labs have been presented. The strong point of a local laboratory is to permit the student to acquire good practical skills, but in the systems proposed in literature there is a lack of interaction with the real equipment. In this paper an approach aimed at conciliating the most important features of local laboratory with the ones of remote laboratory is presented. The attention is focused on the client-unit: the student has to setup a copy of the real circuit located in a laboratory by using real components and low-cost devices emulating the real instrumentations. An automatic procedure tests the correctness of the mounted circuit and, if the check passes, the trainee uses virtual instrumentation techniques to control the real measurement bench, as in a classic remote lab.