The latest developments in virtual reality (VR) are gaining attention in education as they are expected to provide risk-free, hands-on learning experiences. However, the use of VR in laboratory settings is still in its early stages of adoption. Therefore, it remains unclear whether these technologies will be widely adopted to educate students in…

Remote lab experiences are proliferating in higher education, although there are still few studies that manage to build a theoretical framework for educational assessment and design of this technology. In order to explore to what extent the use of facilitators of proximity to the laboratory and the autonomy of the experiment makes remote…

This paper presents a blended-learning strategy for improving the teaching method applied in the laboratory subject Manufacturing Technologies. The teaching method has been changed from a predominantly teacher-centred to an active learning system with a student-centred focus and e-learning activities. In face-to-face classes, a game-based learning…

Over recent decades, education has increasingly focused on student-centered learning. Guided practices represent a new way of learning for undergraduate students of physiology, whereby the students turn into teacher-students and become more deeply involved in the subject by preparing and teaching a practical (laboratory) class to their peers. The…

The use of practical laboratories is a key in engineering education in order to provide our students with the resources needed to acquire practical skills. This is specially true in the case of distance education, where no physical interactions between lecturers and students take place, so virtual or remote laboratories must be used. UNED has…

This paper proposes lab work for learning fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) in mechatronic systems. These skills are important for engineering education because FDD is a key capability of competitive processes and products. The intended outcome of the lab work is that students become aware of the importance of faulty conditions and learn to…

The purpose of the present work is to rethink, in the university context, the concept of genius, related to the high intellectual abilities associated with intelligence; also, to connect the idea of entrepreneurial competences, such as leadership or social commitment. The hypothesis is that a university genius is defined by his high creative…

Remote laboratories give students the opportunity of experimenting in STEM by using the Internet to control and measure an experimental setting. Remote laboratories are increasingly used in the classroom to complement, or substitute for, hands-on laboratories, so it is important to know its learning value. While many authors approach this question…

Social laboratories, defined as experimental spaces for co-creation, have recently become the main centers of innovation. Medialabs are experimental laboratories of technologies and communication media which have co-evolved along with the digital society into mediation laboratories of citizen experimentation, observing a confluence of both models.…

Online laboratories have traditionally been split between virtual labs, with simulated components; and remote labs, with real components. The former tend to provide less realism but to be easily scalable and less expensive to maintain, while the latter are fully real but tend to require a higher maintenance effort and be more error-prone. This…

This paper reports on a state-of-the-art remote laboratory project called Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality (VISIR). VISIR allows wiring and measuring of electronic circuits remotely on a virtual workbench that replicates physical circuit breadboards. The wiring mechanism is developed by means of a relay switching matrix connected to a PCI…

Undergraduate courses in electrical machines often include an introduction to their magnetic circuits and to the various magnetic materials used in their construction and their properties. The students must learn to be able to recognize and compare the permeability, saturation, and losses of these magnetic materials, relate each material to its…

Online laboratories are useful and valuable resources in high education, especially in engineering studies. This work presents a methodology to create effective laboratories for learning that interact with a Learning Management System (LMS) to achieve advanced integration. It is based on pedagogical aspects and considers not only the laboratory…

Automatic evaluation is a challenging field that has been addressed by the academic community in order to reduce the assessment workload. In this work we present a new element for the authoring tool Easy Java Simulations (EJS). This element, which is named automatic evaluation element (AEE), provides automatic evaluation to virtual and remote…

Ongoing technological progress in measurement systems triggered the development of an in­novative, hands-on teaching program to help students toward a fuller understanding of recent changes in the field. This paper presents a lab project that links theoretical principles with the practical issues of signal conditioning systems. This is…