Sakshi Education: Role of the Laboratories in Engineering

Role of the Laboratories in Engineering

From the very beginning of engineering education, laboratories have had a central role in the education of engineers. While there has been a lot of discussion in the perceived importance of laboratory study versus more theoretical classroom work, it has never been suggested that laboratories can be foregone completely. At times, however, they have been taken for granted to a considerable extent. With the advent of the Internet, the development of powerful simulation programs enabled by enormous, cheap computing power, and the growing number of online undergraduate engineering programs have combined to refocus attention on laboratories. The fundamental objectives developed have helped to prompt discussion about why laboratories are important and what are the characteristics of a good laboratory exercise.

Engineering is a hands-on profession:
Engineering is a hands-on profession where doing is key. Despite the important role of laboratories in engineering education, several engineering educators have reported that the expected benefits of laboratories on students' learning are not achieved in most of the cases. Labs should be considered as platforms for facilitating conceptual understanding, and many engineering educators considered that laboratories should also facilitate the design skills. However, constructing knowledge is a complex process which is often out of the timeframe of the planned laboratory sessions.

Shortcomings on laboratory sessions:
The main shortcomings in some of the hands-on laboratory sessions, including that students are often required to solve problems that are more difficult than their cognitive abilities, students are constrained with the short time periods the labs normally offer, and teachers assume that students will be able to overcome the problems in the assigned time. Classical labs are usually taught as one single demonstration due to economical and logistical reasons; however, forming and understanding concepts require repetition. There is a general consensus that laboratory work generates poor learning outcomes compared to the time, effort, and costs invested in laboratory education. A new approach for laboratory education is the method which uses a combination of virtual, remote, and hands-on laboratory sessions and pre-lab and post-lab tests to maximize the information retention of students.

Objectives:
The emphasis on laboratories has varied over the years. While much attention has been paid to curriculum and teaching methods, relatively little has been emphasized about laboratory importance. One reason for this may be a lack of consensus on the basic objectives of the laboratory experience. While there seems to be a general agreement that laboratories are necessary, little has been said about what they are expected to accomplish. In most engineering programs no significance is given to the objectives to be met from laboratory education for graduates. An accepted set of fundamental objectives for laboratories would help engineering educators focus their efforts and evaluate the effectiveness of laboratory experiences. It is useful to distinguish among three basic types of engineering laboratories: development, research, and educational. While they have many characteristics in common, there are some fundamental differences. These must be understood if there is to be an agreement on the educational objectives that the instructional laboratory is expected to meet. Practicing engineers go to the development laboratory for two reasons. First, they often need experimental data to guide them in designing and developing a product. The development laboratory is used to answer specific questions about nature that must be answered before a design and development process can continue. The second reason is to determine if a design performs as intended. Measurements of performance are compared to specifications, and these comparisons either demonstrate compliance or indicate where, if not how, changes need to be made. While a development laboratory is intended to answer specific questions of immediate importance, research laboratories are used to seek broader knowledge that can be generalized and systematized, often without any specific use in mind. The output of a research laboratory is generally an addition to the overall knowledge that we have of the world, be it natural or human made. When students, especially undergraduates, go to the laboratory, however, it is not generally to extract some data necessary for a design but to evaluate a new device, or to discover a new addition to our knowledge of the world. Each of these functions involves determining something that no one else knows or at least that is not generally available. Students, on the other hand, go to an instructional laboratory to learn something that practicing engineers are assumed to already know. That "something" needs to be better defined through carefully designed learning objectives if the considerable effort devoted to laboratories is to produce a concomitant benefit.

Essential role of laboratories:
The essential role of laboratories can be correlated with the fact that engineering is, in general, an applied science that requires hands-on skills and involves elements of design, problem solving, and analytical thinking. Well designed laboratories during undergraduate engineering degrees may well improve these skills of the future engineers.

Virtual Laboratories:
A new modern methodology is proposed based on applying a virtual laboratory environment to provide a preparatory session before the hands-on laboratory to facilitate reflective preparation for the lab. The results show that significant enhancement of the laboratory learning process can be achieved by designing and applying a combination of in-class remote, virtual pre-lab, and hands-on laboratory sessions.

Alternative to physical labs:
With the advent of modern computer technologies, web-based laboratories are used as an alternative or a supplement to physical labs. Physical laboratories are the traditional labs occupying real estate, have real equipment and require technical expertise to function effectively. Web-based laboratories, also known as virtual laboratories, or simply virtual labs, or cyber labs, have become complementary and, in some cases, alternatives to physical labs. Web-based labs are used in the "anytime, anyplace, online learning" world of engineering education. They are also increasingly being used to supplement traditional learning. Virtual laboratories have been developed in a number of engineering and scientific disciplines using a variety of simulation technologies. The virtues of virtual labs are not spread equally. They are not equal in terms of creation, development and maintenance costs. The educational benefits are also not the same. Asynchronous interactivity or high degree of interactivity by geographically separated learners is a key aspect and not offered by all virtual labs. The degree of reality simulated and the software used differ. Some virtual laboratories show two-dimensional images of the laboratory devices and stop at demonstrating the principles while others used Virtual Reality Modeling Language interfacing with MATLAB/ SIMULINK/ MAPLE to simulate a real laboratory. The virtual laboratory with 3-D simulation of the apparatuses provides opportunities for exploration. These methods include: gaining attention, informing students of the objective, stimulating recall of prior knowledge, presenting the stimulus, providing learning guidance, eliciting performance, providing feedback, assessing performance, enhancing retention and transfer of learning.

Laboratory experience at a ‘distance’:
In engineering, the first distance education programs were graduate programs intended primarily, if not solely, for part-time students who were employed full time. Since most graduate programs do not include a laboratory component, the question of how to deliver laboratory experiences did not arise. As undergraduate distance learning programs started to develop, this problem demanded solution. The usual approach was to have students either perform laboratory exercises at another institution (e.g., a local community college) or spend a period of time on the engineering campus in a concentrated laboratory course. In either case, the laboratory was conventional in all except the schedule of activity. Other programs gave remote students laboratory kits they could use at home to perform the course experiments. Distance education programs adopted each new technology (mail, telephone, radio, television, tape recording, and computer) as it came along. None of the technologies, however, solved the difficult problem of how to provide laboratory experience at a distance. Then came the Internet, whose ability to interconnect nodes of technology in an almost instantaneous fashion changed the practice of distance education as well as the expectations of both students and teachers.

Remote access to physical laboratories:
To provide laboratories for students who never come to the campus, there is now a wish to enhance the laboratory experience of on-campus students. There is also the potential to gain efficiencies by better utilizing space and making a single piece of laboratory equipment available to more students. The approach most often employed is to use the Internet to provide students with remote access to physical laboratory apparatus. Most systems of this type are synchronous, giving students a sense of actual involvement in the experiment. Some use online video to further enhance students' sense of presence. The operating software for distance laboratories can be a challenge. Writing such software is a major undertaking so the use of commercial software can be efficient. While some educators believe that the best use of the Internet is to give students access to physical equipment in a physical laboratory, others feel that simulation by itself can provide a meaningful laboratory experience. This can range from having the students solve a problem (i.e., make a prediction) and then use a simulator to see if their solution checks "experimentally" to using a total simulation to teach students the use of electronic or mechanical instruments. Since student access to an experimental apparatus is through a computer terminal, the primary question is whether a simulation can be made so realistic that the student does not know whether the other end is a software package or a set of D/A and A/D converters controlling the instruments measuring a real system. A second question is perhaps the most thought provoking: Do we need to care what the student perceives, as long as he or she meets the learning objectives associated with the laboratory? Whatever solution is used, it is apparent that the delivery of laboratory education today remains a significant challenge to distance-delivered undergraduate engineering education.