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

Journal of Engineering Education, Oct 2001 by Gurocak, Hakan

III. THE E-LAB

A laboratory provides an environment where students can test their ideas on real hardware. Laboratory activities depend on the course, but in a typical engineering laboratory activities include turning knobs, pushing buttons, changing settings, writing software, making electrical or plumbing connections, controlling machines using control panels, setting up parts in machines and cleaning up after the experiments. Students can see, hear, smell and touch the hardware. They can immediately observe what the hardware does as a result of their interactions with it. They usually work in teams and learn from each other in the process. They interact with the instructor to get help and to discuss their ideas. The instructor is an invaluable part of the activity since he or she is guiding the students through the experiments and can help them with conceptual difficulties or in troubleshooting the equipment.

Although it is possible to work with actual hardware over the Internet for delivery of laboratory courses, none of the Internet-accessible laboratories can create the dynamic atmosphere of a real laboratory. This is partly because these laboratories were designed to be used in an asynchronous mode by one student at a time. But the main reason is the inability to deliver reliable live video over the Internet due to lack of bandwidth. This is a major progress-limiting step in distance delivery of laboratory courses and it diminishes the learning experience.

At WSU Vancouver we solved this problem by using the existing WHETS system and the Internet. The WHETS creates a very reliable, real time interactive environment between the local and the remote classrooms. The Internet is used to provide the control channel between students and the lab hardware. The result is the e-Lab where students from Boeing and Pullman can work with those from Vancouver in the "same" laboratory using the same set of equipment without ever being there. Except for making electrical connections and other physical hands-on actions, all of the common features of a real laboratory environment can be created for the remote students with the e-Lab.10

A The WETS interactive TY system

WHETS classrooms resemble TV studios (Figure 2). They are sound-proof and have multiple cameras, microphones and large TV monitors. There are operators in control centers at each site who control the interaction among the sites. For example, on demand the operators can remotely position the cameras to zoom in on the details of a piece of equipment, an instructor's lecture notes, a student who is asking a question or the instructor.

During the 1990s, many institutions and states developed this distance education delivery mode. Examples of systems similar to WHETS can be found in North and South Dakota, Maine, North Carolina, Arizona, California, Ohio, Georgia, Texas, Utah, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and several other states. The State of Washington also has a K-20 network that connects 32 community colleges and 6 universities to each other and to the Internet for videoconferencing and high-speed communications. WHETS can also connect to the K-20 network.