Remote laboratories for renewable energy courses at Jordan universities

In the field of Engineering Education, performing practical experiments is essential, as an accompaniment to magisterial classes, in order to enforce theoretical and practical concepts. This task is much more difficult in distance education since students attend mainly to virtual classes. Therefore, the use of remote laboratories can help minimize this inconvenient. In addition, remote laboratories may help teachers to prepare suitable evaluation on-line experiments, in similar conditions if students were physically in the real laboratory, on the other hand, remote laboratories can be a good complement to real experimentation, as a preparatory step, preparing them to face similar tasks in the immediate future. Accordingly, the principal objective of the European TEMPUS project entitled "Modernizing Undergraduate Renewable Energy Education: EU Experience for Jordan", which supports this work is the development, integration, accreditation, and evaluation of a renewable energy course in the context of engineering degrees from several universities in Jordan. This project follows the guidelines proposed in the Bologna process, and considers the previous experimentation with low-cost renewable energy equipment in order to allow us to study the best approximation of remote laboratories. This is a previous step before addressing this task with complex and expensive equipment.