In EE curriculums, the majority of programs include laboratory work in introductory courses such as circuits and logic design and lab classes are integral part of an engineering course. Until very recently, lab courses stayed as the main obstacle in offering a fully online electrical engineering degree.  In order to rectify the problem, engineering colleges proposed software simulations to replace the lab component. Although simulation may be used to reinforce concepts, practical experiments are needed for undergraduate EE education to develop the student’s skills in dealing with the real instrumentation In addition, simulations alone do not adequately present problems that students may see in an actual lab nor provide adequate hands-on experience necessary for effective learning. One solution to having online laboratories in EE has been the use of lab-in-a-box approach.

In the Lab-in-a box approach, students get hands-on design experience by using a portable and affordable test and measurement device such as the Analog Discovery. For less than the cost of typical textbooks, EE students can have their own labs at their convenience. Analog Discovery provides various instruments that can be easily controlled or observed on any computer via USB port.

Fig. 1 Lab-in-a-box using Analog Discovery

In 2014, we have succeeded in offering of our first EE online laboratory (circuit’s lab) using the “Lab-in-a-box” approach. This was an important milestone as it allowed a completely online lab experience. Following this, all remaining lab courses have been successfully converted to online labs. At Lamar University Electrical Engineering (LUEE), students purchase the Analog Discovery kit during their freshman year as part of their course enrollment requirement in 2016, we have integrated laboratory experiences into purely theoretical courses via Hardware-in-Homework (HiH) concept. The unique measurement features of the Analog Discovery makes it appropriate for upper-level courses as well. In HiH, students are given lab work that they would complete using their portable lab kit or using their own lab using the same lab-in-a-box approach. Since many of our engineering students are “experiential” learners who learn by doing and students acquire a deeper knowledge through hands-on experiences. This would allow courses that either never had a lab experience or lost the lab experience to result in a value added lab experience.

Since we have a very tight integration of online labs in our curriculum at LUEE, it is imperative that we study the effectiveness of online lab experiences with the goal on improving student success and self- efficacy.  

Learning Strategies to be Implemented:

Our project team at Lamar will implement high-impact online lab strategies for the following EE courses: ELEN 2411 Circuits I, ELEN 3421 Electronics I, ELEN 3322 Electronics II, ELEN 3313 Signals and Systems and ELEN 4486 Microcomputers I. These courses play a critical role for students in developing advanced hands-on skills needed before they take the Senior Capstone Design course during final year,  

Introducing open ended design experiences: Rather than giving students a “cookbook” approach where they are guided step by step with instructions, the open-ended design experiences will be given to the students in which students need to figure out a solution for a given set of requirements.

Learners need to develop the procedures through literature or operating manual of the equipment.

It is expected that the open ended activities promoted within the lab course will force the students to become actively involved in each lab, facilitate a dialog with the instructor and each other, and encourage working together as a team

• Accomplishing teamwork in online labs: Online labs using lab-in-a-box approach requires each student to do the work. However, student may miss the feeling of shared accomplishment and collaboration. Student teams will be formed and each team will have a challenging engineering problem and the work will be divided between students so that each student can design his / her own approach to solving the problem. Students in an online laboratory class can be divided into groups of three so that they can use their actual lab experience and understanding of the techniques to propose new experiments to solve the problem. Student involvement in the laboratories increases if the experiments are designed and executed by the students themselves. We will use cooperative learning strategies for online laboratories which include carefully structured cooperative learning.
• Overcoming the isolation of the online labs and make it a learning community: Platforms such as Blackboard Collaborate and Discussion Forums can create a learning community for labs and allow for interpersonal exchanges that often lead to deeper meaning and understanding. In order to further mimic the “lab chat” that occurs on campus, discussion boards in Blackboard (BB) will be used to foster peer-to-peer teaching and deepen the learning experience. The BB Collaborate platform includes virtual classroom and online meeting spaces to share presentation material and can allow communication and collaboration between students and faculty via live audio, video and chat tools.  Regular lab chat sessions with instructor presence will be arranged in order to help students build a relationship with their classmates and the professor. We will make extensive use of Blackboard Discussion forum and Collaborate tools in order to create a learning community. In addition, we will also interface our learning community with other learning communities such as LU Field Flow which includes our entire Lamar EE undergraduate cohort.
• Incorporating pre-lab simulations and pre-lab video demonstrations: The simulations allow students to attempt the experiments they will do in the laboratory in a risk-free way that provides the opportunity to make mistakes and learn how to correct them using the immediate feedback generated. It can contribute to increased attainment and improvement in student confidence. Pre-lab video demonstrations can also help ease the frustration students experiencing in labs therefore increasing the confidence to carry out the activities during online lab sessions.   Visual representations allow students to develop a mental picture of what they will be doing in laboratory classes which can increase student confidence. Hence, all the online labs in this study will be incorporating pre-lab simulations and pre-lab video demonstrations.

The methods applied here to expand the online EE laboratory experience should be applicable to other STEM disciplines as well. 

Broader Impacts:

The proposed project is expected to enrich learning experiences for engineering major students and K-12 students and teachers in the STEM field through hands-on lab activities.

An experiment bank will be designed and will include many experiments covering various areas in EE.  These labs will include open-ended design problems, pre-lab video demonstrations and simulations, strategies for effective teamwork and e-learning community. In designing these experiments, the results of our active learning lab strategies and findings will be incorporated.

There will be “a separate lab module” in Moodle platform targeting high schools and AP students interested in EE. The high-school lab module will also include the “lab-in-a-box” online tutorial. This tutorial will teach high-school students and teachers on how to perform experiments and use various instruments using Analog Discovery kit.

Finally, webinars will be arranged each year via Moodle to inform high-school science teachers regarding the enhanced lab practice and the use of lab-in-a-box.

Presentations:

Sayil, J. Yoo and G. V. Tcheslavski, “Engaged and Active Learning Through Collaborative Online Lab Experiences”, Presented at the 2022 Southeast Symposium on Contemporary Engineering Topics (SSCET), September 16, 2022, at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. https://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/wordpressua.uark.edu/dist/2/760/files/2022/09/2022-The-AEF-SSCET-Agenda.pdf 

G.V. Tcheslavski, S. Sayil, J. Yoo, 2022, “Promoting Engaged and Active Learning in Electrical Eng. thru Collaborative Online Lab Experiences”, 2022 Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) National Summit, June 1-3, 2022, Washington, DC. (Poster presentation) https://www.aaas-iuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Gleb-Tcheslavski-Promoting-Engaged-and-Active-Learning.pdf  

Papers and Proceedings:

S. Sayil, J. Yoo and G. Tcheslavski, "Creating Engaged and Active Learning Through Collaborative Online Lab Experiences," Proceedings of the 2022 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), Uppsala, Sweden, 2022, pp. 1-5.  https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9962493  

Project Outreach: 

We have crafted a presentation explaining electricity for upper elementary and middle school students, while including age-appropriate experiments using the Analog Discovery - the hardware module that we use in our lab-in-a-box strategy. The presentation was delivered during two Summer 2022 outreach activities: Sturrock Montessori LU campus visit and LITE College of Engineering camp for 7th and 8th graders.

We have also attended the “Travel for Engineers in Real Life at Clearlake” event at Clear Lake High School on February 25, 2023 and informed about our lab-in-a-box strategy. We have presented some demos using real circuits and Analog Discovery to graduating high school students. 

A webinar has been given to local high school teachers working in STEM and we informed them about the lab-in-a-box approach and our active learning strategies on 2/17/2023.