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Session: 2963

A Laboratory Course with Remote and Local Students

Hakan Gurocak

Manufacturing Engineering Washington State University 14204 NE Salmon Creek Ave. Vancouver, WA 98686

Abstract: Hands-on experience gained in a laboratory is an invaluable part of the learning activity in undergraduate education. However, delivery of the laboratory experience in a distance education setting is a challenging problem. Our manufacturing engineering curriculum contains a required control systems course with weekly labs. This paper presents an electronic laboratory book called e-LabBook developed to deliver the “hands-on” lab experience with real equipment over the Internet. Design and implementation details of the e-LabBook are explained. Results from a recent course offering with the e-LabBook indicate that it can be a viable option in providing “hands-on” lab experience.

I. Introduction Manufacturing engineering is a very broad discipline. Consequently, manufacturing engineers typically engage in a diverse range of activities such as plant engineering, manufacturing processes, machine design and product design. In just about any of these roles a manufacturing engineer is faced with a control system since today's trend is towards a high level of manufacturing automation and design of smart products.

Our Manufacturing Engineering curriculum contains a control systems course, ME375 “Manufacturing Control Systems,” with a weekly laboratory component. We have been offering this course in a traditional way where students are required to attend lab sessions to conduct experiments with hardware. However, given the multi-campus university setting, we share courses with other campuses of the university. Since mid 1980s the university has been operating an interactive TV system called WHETS. This system links all campuses and facilitates real time, two-way audio/video interactivity among classrooms across campuses. It is extensively used for distance delivery of lecture format courses. Using this system we can offer a course from the Vancouver campus to students at other campuses in real time.

We plan to offer the ME 375 course to the other campuses of the university but the required laboratory component is a challenge to handle in a distance delivery mode. In an attempt to

Proceedings of the 2003 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2003, American Society for Engineering Education

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Gurocak, H. (2003, June), A Laboratory Course With Remote And Local Students Paper presented at 2003 Annual Conference, Nashville, Tennessee. 10.18260/1-2--12365