The Future of Education

It is widely known that for engineering education, laboratory classes are of particular importance. Due to this fact, in recent years, several specific applications have been developed to allow conducting such classes at a distance or even virtually [1]. However, in general, lab classes were not considered to be carried out by students completely online. The COVID19 pandemic imposed restrictions that had to be respected, thus changing the paradigm of such classes. Moreover, certain European initiatives (such as the initiative related to the European Universities - Transnational alliances of higher education institutions [2]) have led to the need to conduct classes in this way even after the pandemic restrictions were lifted. In this article we review the ways in which the teaching staff from our university have adapted to these new realities (starting from filming, with more or less talent, the measurements performed by the teaching staff during the pandemic event, up to the modification of the curricula in order to grant the possibility to use available free online resources for such activities). The emphasis goes to the use of freeware for replicating the existing stands in the laboratory and to the use of public access databases for the virtual laboratories. Some of the problems that may arise in such cases are presented and conclusions are drawn based on experience and feedback from our students.

Keywords: Online laboratories, freeware, public databases 

References:

[1] A "Learning Path” towards the Personalized Engineering Education, Anton Anton, Romeo Susan-Resiga, Andrei-Mugur Georgescu, Liviu Stroia, Conference Proceedings, 4^th International conference “The future of education”, Florence, Italy, ISBN 978-88-6292-499-3, 2014

[2] https://education.ec.europa.eu/education-levels/higher-education/european-universities-initiative