E-laboratories for sound and vibration education

Abstract

Several universities face the problem of overcrowded classes and laboratories; hence, there is a difficulty of delivering high quality education, which will affect the quality of graduating engineers. It is needed to introduce the missing experimental part in teaching of the courses without the burden of building new labs. This is done by making these experiments available virtually over the internet, available to the students 24 hours to repeat the experiment as many times as necessary to meet the learning objectives of the experiment. Several elearning programs exist nowadays with regards to courses and teaching material but there are very few e-laboratories available worldwide. Some of the e-laboratories are fully simulated and some are real hardware at the university lab and controlled over the internet. There are a number of technical challenges to realize these e-laboratories; the learning management system to handle this virtual campus, the communication between the client machines and the hardware experiments, and the transfer of data to the client machine for further postprocessing. This paper introduces some of the e-laboratories in Sound and Vibration Education, which were developed and implemented within a project funded by the European Commission through the Tempus Program.