Abstract
The paper presents a Moodle-enabled remote laboratory intended to teach the principles of process control using the Foundation Fieldbus technology. The student logs into Moodle and accesses a “Virtual PC” learning activity that opens a private remote desktop with all set to run an FF simulator. Behind the scenes, a virtualization infrastructure, hosted on the Azure cloud, handles storage, cloning and deployment of virtual machines. The paper explains how this infrastructure was set up and how it works internally. Positive results were achieved with a limited number of students, on an elective course, making us believe that this infrastructure can be extended to highly populated courses.
Highlights
The paper presents a remote laboratory, fully integrated in Moodle, intended to teach the principles of process control using the Foundation Fieldbus (FF) technology (Glanzer 2003)
The integration was possible thanks to Moodle’s Virtual PC activity, which provides access to virtual machines powered by virtualization platforms (e.g. Microsoft Azure)
FF function blocks are implemented as virtual instruments, data links are represented by virtual wires, and bus monitoring tools are replaced by application debugging
Summary
The paper presents a remote laboratory, fully integrated in Moodle, intended to teach the principles of process control using the Foundation Fieldbus (FF) technology (Glanzer 2003). The simulator, named Quimera (Viegas et al 2016), has been used at the Polytechnic of Setúbal since 2016 to teach courses in the areas of process control and industrial automation. The paper focus on the integration of the FF simulator into the Moodle infrastructure to provide a fully integrated experience of blended learning. Students can start a virtual machine remotely, open LabVIEW and use the simulator. All this is made under the control of Moodle, which provides context, scheduling, and assessment, among other facilities useful to the learning process. The paper is organized as follows: section 2 presents the FF simulator to be used by students; section 3 explains how the simulator was virtualized and made remote; and section 4 presents results and extracts conclusions
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