Federated Non-Traditional Practical Work for Engineering

Abstract

Non-traditional practical work is conducted primarily with digital technologies, such as remote-, simulated- and virtual-laboratories, and is optimally used as a complement to, or extension of, existing traditional practical work. The increasing desire for more active learning in the higher education sector, coupled with increasing student numbers, means that it is impossible to meet the outstanding demand for practical work by using only traditional laboratory facilities alone. This paper gives a brief overview of the educational case for non-traditional practical work, before going to give an outline for a software architecture that would allow the federation of remote laboratory experiments between different institutions, which would be a valuable education tool in areas such as antennas and propagation where test and measurement equipment and test devices can be expensive, fragile, and difficult or problematic to access.