Outline

2. Outline The state of art up to 2 years ago • e-tools & distance learning in Instrumentation and Measurement • novelty aspects of LA.DI.RE. • new frontiers offered by satellite infrastructure, wide band connection and interlink are driving towards: • Didactic experiments for different countries • Real time visualization • Assessment of system quality Recent progresses in the last 2 years Recent novelties in LA.DI.RE.

3. e-tools & distance learning in Instrumentation and Measurement • In scientific and engineering fields, crucial phase of the learning process is the practical training activity: • to assure a good knowledge transfer from the teacher to the students. • Teaching in Instrumentation & Measurement science: • students have to work on real instrumentation , • in conditions as realistic as possible, • haveto repeat the same experience several times.

4. e-tools & distance learning in Instrumentation and Measurement Main drawbacks: • high cost of measurement instrumentation, • high management cost of experimental laboratories, • reduced number of laboratory technical personnel and their expensive updating, • increasing number of students, A solution… Virtual Laboratories(VL) to share the limited resources of one or more laboratories among a large number of teachers and students over Internet.

5. novelty aspects of LA.DI.RE. • General characteristics: • Collaborative learning tools (chat, forum), • Virtual classrooms, • Test editing and managing tools, • Learner activity tracking, • Feedback tools, • Statistic analysis tools, • Access control and logs. • Laboratory specific: • Remote control of instrumentation and distribution of GUIs, • Concurrency management for supervised, and concurrent work sessions, • Reserving resources, • Scheduling requests. • It includes the features of a complete • Learning Management System (LMS) • with experiments on actual measurement instrumentation.

6. LA.DI.RE. architecture

7. new frontiers offered by interlink European Community Lisbon Program declares: • “Europe will need to invest more in its young people, education, research and innovation, so that we can provide our society with the assets and outlook to generate wealth and provide security for every citizen“. • European Commission established European Training Foundation (ETF) which mission is to assist partner Countries in developing quality education and training systems and in putting them into practice. • Due to the wide political and social transformation in East Europe, Western Balkan and Mediterranean area, there is increasing need for new teaching approaches similar to European one.

8. new frontiers offered by interlink • e-learning seems to be the best way to reach these objectives, as it removes the physical, geographical and cultural barriers to the education and enables the learners in choosing their own learning path and time. • ”Personally, I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught”(Winston Churchill) • The LA.DI.RE. has been upgraded: • by covering different topics and aspects of the teaching program of instrumentation and measurement at the Technical University (Croatia, Greece, Slovakia and Ukraine), • by taking into account the different countries and language of the students.

9. Overview on the available didactic experiments • Sampling and windowing of signals • In the first level, the student experiments (i) the techniques for signal sampling, and (ii) the effects in the frequency domain of the different modality of the possible signal windowing techniques. • In the second level, by simultaneously setting the characteristics of both the digital signal generator and the digital oscilloscopes the student experiments (i) the techniques for signal sampling, and (iii) the effects of signal windowing.

10. Overview on the available didactic experiments AC power interference cancellation in ECG signals using adaptive filters • The experiment has been designed to show the effects of a sinusoidal interference having a frequency of 50Hz on an ECG signal. • The objective is to show how a right performed numerical processing of a measurement signal can effectively improve the capabilities in estimating the required parameters.

11. Overview on the available didactic experiments • Uncertainty characterization of digital instrumentation • The experiment allows the student to evaluate the uncertainty characteristics of a generic digital instrument by analyzing separately the different uncertainty contributions and their influence on measurement accuracy.

12. visualization procedure

13. Real time visualization • The displaying of instruments in addition to the VI front panel, is relevant aspect of the learning process, and it greatly increases the realism of the laboratory activity. Implementation on LA.DI.RE. • by using JMF, it has been possible to add the remote monitoring of the instrument front panels to the existing user interfaces of the experiments without redesigning the whole software architecture. • MPEG-4 codec is used.

14. System components for real-timevideo instrumentation in LA.DI.RE.

15. experimental results of the codes MPEG-4, H.263, JPEG Frame size: H.263 codec 352 × 288 and 176 × 144 JPEG and MPEG-4 codec 320 × 240, and 160 × 120. Quality factor: H.263 codec equal to 0.5 JPEG codec in [0, . . . , 1]. Compression factor: MPEG-4 codec in the range [0, . . . , 1].

16. Assessment of system quality Working Group “e-tools for Education in Instrumentation & Measurement” Co-ordinator: D. Grimaldi, Secretary: S. Rapuano IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society, Technical Committee TC-23 Education in Instrumentation and Measurement. In the framework of the WG is proposed to evaluate and assess the quality of both the e-learning system and the provided services

17. Assessment of system quality Remote labs are different from hands-on labs: • for the distance between the experiment and the experimenter. “service quality” is the difference between user expectations on the service and his/her perceptions about it. SERVQUAL methodology allows the detection of the gap between the differences of the user expectations and the real perceptions, question set allows obtaining numeric value Global Servqual Score (PSG) .

18. Assessment of system quality • The realized questionnaire presents two important parts: • first part concerning the quality of system: Internet navigation, usability, access procedure, bandwidth problems, helpdesk, experienced delays, overall system functionalities; • second part concerning the quality of services: course duration, graphics, content clearness, completeness of the contents.

19. question Assessment of system quality User accesses October 2005 – September 2006. question User expectation User perception User expectation User perception "power area" (PSG Mean > 3) "improvement area" (PSG Mean<3)

20. Conclusion and future trend Overview is provided on the recent progresses in the last two years of the LA.DI.RE. “G. Savastano” project: • Didactic experiments for different countries • Real time visualization • Assessment of system quality Ongoing activity is devoted to extend the frontier of the e-learning to the mobile e-learning. Therefore, the ongoing research is addressed to explore the use of the mobile devices in the teaching of the electrical and electronic measurement and instrumentation.