e-Lab: An electronic classroom for real-time distance delivery of a laboratory course

Journal of Engineering Education, Oct 2001 by Gurocak, Hakan

So far we have delivered a junior level manufacturing processes laboratory course to Boeing. This course requires familiar machine tool equipment such as lathes, milling machines, joining and material testing. Using WHETS, the lectures were delivered from WSU Pullman to WSU Vancouver, WSU Tri-Cities and Boeing by one instructor. The laboratory sessions that were originally designed for the facilities at WSU Pullman were adapted for locally available equipment at each receiving site. We refer to this as approximated laboratories because equipment used at each site is slightly different than the others, depending on availability. For example, in the Seattle area we made arrangements with two community colleges to use their facilities and their instructors for the Boeing students. In a typical semester, we had students from four different locations taking this course. Although these students were taking the same course, their laboratory experiences turned out to be quite different depending on the equipment and temporary laboratory instructor available at each remote site. Besides the high cost and difficult logistics, the main problem we faced with approximated laboratories was the inconsistency in the quality of education among the students taking the same course. This was unavoidable since it was impossible to find exactly the same set of equipment at every location. One of the upper division laboratory courses WSU Vancouver needs to deliver to Boeing and to share with other campuses is ME475 Manufacturing Automation. This course includes laboratory sessions with automation hardware/software, programmable logic controllers (PLC), industrial robots and computer numerical control (CNC) machines. We could not deliver this course using the approximated lab approach since the course requires sophisticated hardware and software. In this case, the problem of finding similar equipment at multiple sites was more difficult since our community college partners as well as the other WSU campuses do not even have the needed hardware or the software.

We evaluated many other alternatives such as condensed lab sessions in summer or mailing videotapes of the lab equipment in action, etc. But none of these options could be implemented due to scheduling conflicts or lack of resources. Using a Web-based laboratory is an attractive option. There are a few examples of such laboratories.3-7 The most significant of these is a collection of control systems experiments at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC)., This on-line laboratory allows remotely located students to conduct experiments with actual devices in a laboratory at UTC by accessing them over the Internet. The advantage of this setup is that students can conduct the experiments any time they want if the equipment is not in use by another student. However, the main drawback is that the system cannot create an environment that resembles a real laboratory. Most importantly, the instructor and the other students, who are integral parts of an active learning environment, are missing.