| Prof. Tim Drysdale (The School of Engineering) |
| Mon 29 Apr 2019, 14:00 - 15:00 |
| IF 4.31/4.33 |
If you have a question about this talk, please contact: Allison Kruk (v1atayl6)
Refreashments provided
Title
Remote laboratories for education – browser-based practical work using real equipment
Abstract
Our geographically fragmented campuses, disparate student schedules, and traditional estate offers challenges and opportunities to a system that seeks to connect any student with any apparatus at any time, using their browser. Yet just such a system is now under development. The purpose is to permit students to conduct online practical work that complements our existing traditional practical work and open up new areas for educational benefits. Non-traditional laboratories (e.g. online practical work) are emerging in the educational literature as producing as-good or better outcomes than traditional work, with a mixture indicated to be optimal. In my recent award-winning work at another institution, I developed a centralised facility for delivering online practical work to distance learning students, intended for the scale of hundreds of simultaneous experiments. It was first used over the duration of a course of > 120 students accessing > 40 simultaneous experiments, each with individual credentials updated every hourly session, and with video, control and data being self-checked on every apparatus also every session (with good replacements seamlessly used if issues were detected). Now, the aim is broader, encompassing pooling of thousands of items of equipment across our campuses and across institutions nationally, and eventually, internationally. The required infrastructure is totally different to a centralised facility, taking on aspects of distributed peer-to-peer networks. Starting again from scratch, its design encompasses aspects of distributed systems, security, human-computer interaction, low-latency video and data transport, system automation, and integration with institutional learning technologies. Another side to the work is developing additional value out of the data stream between equipment and students, such as using artificial intelligence to interpret student interactions. Come along to find out about the system design to date, future plans, and to see a proof-of-concept interaction with an experiment. It is a work in progress, so I invite comments and contributions.
Biography
Prof Timothy Drysdale is the Chair of Technology Enhanced Science Education in the School of Engineering, having joined the University of Edinburgh in August 2018. Immediately prior to that he was a Senior Lecturer in Engineering at the Open University, where he was the founding director and lead developer of the £3M openEngineering Laboratory. The openEngineering Laboratory is a large-scale online laboratory offering real-time interaction with teaching equipment via the web, for undergraduate engineering students, which has attracted educational awards from the Times Higher Education (Outstanding Digital Innovation, 2017), The Guardian (Teaching Excellence, 2018), Global Online Labs Consortium (Remote Experiment Award, 2018), and National Instruments (Engineering Impact Award or Education in Europe, Middle East, Asia Region 2018). He is now developing an entirely new approach to online laboratories to support a mixture of non-traditional online practical work activities across multiple campuses. His discipline background is in electronics and electromagnetics.