The Electronic Laboratoty Journal: A Web-Based Collaborative Environment for Remote Experimentation

The Electronic Laboratory Journal: A Web-Based Collaborative Environment for Remote Experimentation Georgios Fakas, and Denis Gillet Numerous tools have been developed that support the collaboration between students in education, tools that mainly include facilities for sharing documents and enabling discussions. However, these environments do not emphasize the use of facilities that sustain collaborative work in the framework of remote experimentation carried out by a group of students located at different places. We propose the Electronic Laboratory Journal paradigm, as a collaborative and cooperative environment for remote experimentation in engineering education. The Electronic Laboratory Journal enhances the traditional laboratory journal, by providing a group of students with Web-based tools to maintain notes in order to remotely complete their experimentation assignment by collecting, discussing, exchanging or sharing information and also by documenting and finally submitting their results to their educators. Notes may be composed of numerous objects of any format, such as text, images, graphics, manuscripts, measurement logs or simulation results. The Laboratory Journal also facilitates educators to remotely supervise, assist and tutor the progression of students with their learning activities. The Electronic Laboratory Journal paradigm is currently validated in the framework of the eMersion project, which aims at developing at EPFL (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne) hands-on resources for flexible learning in engineering education focusing on remote manipulation of real setups and web-based simulation facilities. The Laboratory Journal is designed to be an open and reusable Web-based application. For this reason, XML and Java technologies are deployed. This paper presents the Electronic Laboratory Journal environment, its application and validation in the eMersion project, its pedagogical benefits, and its technical peculiarities. Index Terms  Knowledge Engineering, Collaborative Learning, Distance Learning, Web-Based Experimentation.

Introducing Flexibility in Traditional Engineering Education by Providing Dedicated on-line Experimentation and Tutoring Resources

Denis Gillet

Accepted to the International Conference on Engineering Education 18-22 August 2002, Manchester, UK Introducing Flexibility in Traditional Engineering Education by Providing Dedicated Online Experimentation and Tutoring Resources Sylvie Ursulet and Denis Gillet Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL) School of Enginerring, ME – Ecublens, CH – 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland Tel: +41 21 693-5168, FAX: +41 21 693-2574 Email: denis.gillet@epfl.ch Abstract The clear distinction we had in the past between the open universities and the traditional ones is nowadays vanishing. While the open universities are more and more supplying online the learning material that was previously delivered by postal services, the traditional universities are making some of their course contents available through the Internet. This trend brings both the open and the traditional academic institutions to potentially meet the educational needs of a same segment of the student community. This also leads towards a hybrid learning scheme in which online courses can be combined with on-campus studies in traditional curricula. Such a scheme is an interesting form of what is defined as flexible education. With the MIT decision to provide a free access to 2000 of its courses over the next 10 years and with the well spread European conviction that the knowledge is not a marketable product, the identity and the reputation of the universities will mainly depend in a near future on the accredited courses selection and on the student support offer. The typical online content that includes video-on-demand streams and electronic documents will hence be considered just as today textbooks. In engineering education, the potential added value that can be brought in student support comes from the availability of resources for carrying out hands-on experimentation and of tutors for sustaining the learning process. These requirements that are well recognized in traditional education gain even more importance in distance learning and in flexible education to compensate for the students’ remoteness. The paper describes an ongoing initiative to provide a flexible access to remote experimentation resources for engineering students at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne. It shows how the tutoring scheme as been adapted to sustain the transition from traditional teaching to flexible learning. Evaluation results obtained during the first deployment year with pilot students from mechanical engineering are also presented and analyzed.

2002

Evaluation of a Web-Based Training Environment for Hands-On Experimentation

Denis Gillet, Anh Vu Nguyen Ngoc, Stéphane Sire

The role of evaluation in software development has been well established. It is of first importance in usability engineering. Over the last years, many interactive systems have benefited from user evaluation, including e- learning applications. As with other interactive systems, designers of Web- based training environments can benefit from the results of an evaluation to detect the strengths and weaknesses of their application, and to prepare the next version. However, it is not obvious to evaluate educational software. It requires the transposition of the usability concepts of effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction to a domain that is at the crossroads of multiple sub-domains: interactive systems, collaborative work and learning theories. In this article, we present a use-case of the evaluation of a flexible learning environment for hands on experiments. The first part of the article presents the flexible environment proposed to engineering students at the Swiss federal institute of Technology. It also defines the objectives of a user evaluation according to some of the design choices we made. In this evaluation, we have two types of objectives. First, we want to check if the flexibility permitted by a Web-based training environment is really put into practice by the students, if it has some effects on the place and the time at which they choose to work. Second, we want to check if a new component that we have introduced in our environment for sharing and commenting experimental results, the eJournal, really supports the flexible learning scenario and enhances collaborative learning. The second part of the article examines some of the most common evaluation methods used in interactive system design and in Computer Supported Cooperative Work. For each of these methods, such as checklists, questionnaires, log analysis and interviews, we describe how they could contribute to meet our evaluation objectives as defined in the first part. Finally, the third part of the article reports on our user evaluation of the flexible environment described in the first part. This reports describes first the evaluation methodology that we have selected. It describes the evaluation tools selected among the tools introduced in the second part, and the adaptations we made to fit our purposes. In particular, it describes some of the constraints imposed by experimenting with a panel of students pursuing their academic year at the same time. The reports then give some of the results of the evaluation we made with 30 students in automatic control using our prototype during the winter semester 2002/2003. The contribution of the article is to expose, through a use-case, the challenges of the evaluation of a Web-based training environment for sharing laboratory experiments. We think this is a necessary step towards the development of standard practices for evaluating e-learning applications.

2003

Collaborative Web-based Experimentation in Flexible Engineering Education

Denis Gillet, Anh Vu Nguyen Ngoc

The Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland, is deploying a flexible learning scheme for selected pilot courses in engineering education. In such a scheme, traditional lectures and written exercises are combined with additional Web-based learning resources. The main objective of this initiative is to sustain the evolution from traditional teaching to active learning and to better integrate the increasing number of educational resources available online. In engineering education, a key activity to sustain the learning process is hands-on experimentation carried out using either simulation tools or real equipment. This paper describes how a collaborative Web-based experimentation environment has been introduced at the EPFL for providing more flexibility to students performing laboratory experiments in automatic control, biomechanics, and fluid mechanics. It particularly describes the eJournal, a Web service integrated in the proposed learning environment that enables the collection and sharing of preparatory notes and experimental results with both peers and teaching assistants.