Developing engineering laboratory education: hybrid virtual lab
The opportunity for students to engage in practical work (hands on experience) such as relating theory with practice and motivating students is an essential component of degree programmes in the Engineering.
Research Opportunities
Summary
There are substantial educational benefits to be realised when high-quality virtual tools are fully integrated alongside traditional laboratory sessions within curricula, each complementing, reinforcing, and enhancing the learning from the other. Current students are the” Digital Generation”, advanced technologies play a big part in their lives, therefore, discipline specialists, industry, and students should work in a collaborative partnership to develop high-quality virtual tools, making full use of emerging technologies, offering flexibility in laboratory format and improve the quality of the overall university experience.
As we are living in the age of Beyond Digitisation, the way how information has been captured, visualised and interacted are completely different as they were in 10 years before. Traditional digitisation process only involves 2D forms such as images, videos etc. where we are now working towards 3D modelling, 3D scanning and advanced digitisation process. In engineering education, there are still quite a lot of fields are waiting to be digitised in new forms and providing hybrid user interactions in meaningful ways. Enhancing the student experience of laboratory practical to work across boundaries and promote high quality learning and transnational education. The hybrid virtual lab ”VLab” would accommodate different student learning styles, preferences, or needs. In additional, enhance collaborative teaching and learning support, keeping students motivated and engaged by user friendly applications, creating share costly equipment and resources in hybrid of real and virtual forms, which are otherwise available to limited number of users due to constraints on resources, time, and work.
Engineering education research is an emerging field of science that is still in the process of rigor establishment. Virtual experimentation facilitates active, enquiry-based learning rather than the passive, protocol driven learning normally found in traditional laboratories, are low cost and enable students to learn in their own time and pace. Their use also overcomes health and safety constraint issues.
Engineering Education Challenges
Changes in technological awareness amongst the “digital generation” are driving a trend towards the seamless integration of technology in the traditional learning environment. The demand of engineers with employability and digital skills will be increasing in the next years rapidly. The rapid pace of change in today’s world and global challenges also means that it is more crucial than ever to develop our student’s skills and attributes necessary to be digitally literate to meet industry requirements. Utilising VLabs provides students with the chance to develop critical thinking, innovative, enriches digital, team working, communication and key employability skills all of which are highly valued in today’s job market. Transferring the traditional laboratories to the hybrid of real and virtual forms are therefore urgent and timely especially in the current post-pandemic recovery.
Aims
The overall aim of the research is to facilitate and enhancing laboratory education via implementing new technical and pedagogical models of conducting laboratories through the development of a novel laboratory model virtual access mode.
Objectives
The specific objectives of the research are to:
- Critically review and assess the pedagogical benefits use of virtual tools across the Engineering.
- Develop a framework for the implementation of hybrid labs with a case applied to the Oil and Gas Engineering and Mechanical Engineering laboratory.
- Determine the impact of the integration of the components of the hybrid approach on students’ learning experience by using educational research methods and modern pedagogical theories.
- Develop pedagogically informed model that may cope with the shortcomings of the traditional approach of teaching and learning of engineering labs.
- Use feedback theory for modelling learning and pedagogical processes, e.g. providing effective feedback and formative assessment or activating self-regulated learning.
- Evaluation and explore the beyond digitisation process to transfer the traditional education methods to the mixture of real and virtual experience.
- Explore the challenging research and development practise on the user interactions in virtual space (such as Extended Reality (XR), WebVR, web-based information visualisation and interactions) for digital upskilling and new pedagogical experiment in Engineering.
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